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“Why are You Sweating?”

I asked all 140 of my eighth-grade students to divide 10 by 2. Just eight of them wrote down 5.
I knew my students would need remedial work, but I had no idea it would be to this extent. One of the first standards for eighth-grade physical science is manipulating this equation: speed equals distance divided by time (S = D/T). This is a foundation for upper-level skills in physical science. Next come velocity, acceleration, and gravity. I knew that many of my eighth-grade students would have trouble converting fractions into decimals, but I never fathomed that 10 divided by 2 would give so many of them trouble.
They made comments such as, “Mr. Chapman, this is science class, not math class. I hate math.” Almost half of the first periodic assessment given in November will be based on division, multiplication, and addition to solve for a scientific term. Division remedial work was a must.

Board Talks Will Focus on a New Blueprint

Susan Troller
The Capital Times
September 25, 2007

Football coach Barry Switzer’s famous quote, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple,” could easily apply to schools and school districts that take credit for students who enter school with every advantage and continue as high achievers all along.
But how do you fairly judge the job that teachers, schools and districts with many children who have significant obstacles — obstacles like poverty, low parental expectations, illness and disability or lack of English proficiency — are doing? Likewise, how do you make certain that your top students are adding growth every year as they go through school, rather than just coasting toward some average or proficient standard?

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A UW-Madison education prof seeks middle school science teachers to participate in a professional development project.
Improving science teaching with hypertext support

Researcher: Sadhana Puntambekar
Email puntambekar@education.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-0829
Link to site: www.compassproject.net/info
News context:
Science Magazine: The World of Undergraduate Education
Previous participants include:
Contacts:
Kelly Francour: kfrancou@marinette.k12.wi.us
Dana Gnesdilow: gnesdilow@wisc.edu
Hands-on science lab activities provide students with engaging ways to learn. But sometimes students don’t fully learn the concepts behind what they’re doing.
A hypertext computer environment being developed and field tested gives students graphical ways to practice learning and relating science concepts like ‘force’ and ‘energy,’ for example.
The program, called CoMPASS, helps ensure that hands-on construction activities leads to student understanding of the underlying deep science principles and phenomena.
UW-Madison education professor Sadhana Puntambekar points out that reading, writing, and communicating are an essential part of science instruction.
Research has pointed out the important role of language in science. Yet informational text is seldom used to complement hands-on activities in science classrooms.
This CoMPASS computer environment gives students a graphical, interactive, hypertext ‘concept map’ to help students visualize concepts and their relations. Navigating these ‘concept maps’ helps student make connections between abstract concepts, and to select text resources based on the relatedness of the documents to each other.
Eighth-grade students using the CoMPASS ‘concept maps’ performed better on essay question requiring depth. On a concept mapping test, students using CoMPASS made richer connections between concepts in their own maps (6th and 8th grades)
The CoMPASS environment helps teachers, too. It gives them another way to observe how well students learn.
The system is being used in inquiry-based curriculum units in sixth and eighth grade science classes. To date, CoMPASS has been used by over 1000 students in sixth and eighth grades in Wisconsin and Connecticut.

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Madison schools’ lunch period isn’t what it used to be

Andy Hall:

And somehow, in a time window one third the size that many adults take for lunch, 215 young children crowd around picnic-style tables, consume chicken nuggets — or whatever they brought from home — and hustle outside to play.
Squeezed by tight school budgets, the federal No Child Left Behind law and Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction rules on instructional time, the school lunch period isn’t what it used to be in many school districts.
ver the years,” said Frank Kelly, food services director of the Madison School District, who estimates that overall, school lunch periods in the district have been trimmed about 10 minutes over the past 10 years.
“I don’t think people are going to accept anything less than this.”
In fact, in response to complaints from parents four years ago, Madison officials eased the lunch crunch a bit for elementary students by using the last five minutes of the class period before lunch to move students to the cafeteria.
There was talk four years ago of expanding the elementary lunch period to 35 minutes. But the idea was dropped after officials estimated it might cost more than $2 million to pay teachers and lunch supervisors.
“We don’t have much flexibility in extending that,” said Sue Abplanalp, an assistant superintendent who oversees Madison’s elementary schools.
While DPI leaves it up to local officials to determine the length of lunch periods, Madison educators say they believe they attain a decent compromise by giving:
•Elementary students 20 minutes.
•Middle school students 30 to 34 minutes.
•High school students about 35 minutes (except at West High School, where most students get 55 minutes under a plan initiated last year).
Those schedules are typical of what’s found around Wisconsin, said Kelly, who has worked in food service for 31 years.
“For most of our people, it works very well,” Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater said.

Michelle Rhee on the Washington, DC School System

Video:

It may not be Cornell ’77, but here and just below (part 1) and here and the second video below (part 2) are videos of a speech Michelle Rhee gave the other night discussing the state of affairs in Washington, D.C. that are well worth checking out. If you want the inside view of the challenges there and the ones facing urban schools more generally, you can’t do much better than this. I keep hearing how there is nothing to any of these issues reformers keep raising…starting to think maybe I’m being snowed…See also this Richard Whitmire post:

The surprise star at last night’s launch of the Democrats For Education Reform was Michelle Rhee, the new DC schools chancellor. With her humor and spunk very much intact in spite of smacking repeatedly against what may be the worst-run school central office in the entire country, Rhee regaled a crowd of about 100 national education reformers at the Hotel Washington across from the U.S. Treasury Department with fresh stories from close quarters bureaucratic combat.

U.S. Set to Offer Math Grants Modeled on Reading First

Sean Cavanagh:

A year and a half ago, President Bush proposed the creation of a new federal mathematics effort that would offer millions of dollars in grants to school districts to adopt proven strategies for improving classroom instruction in that subject.
Last month, federal lawmakers gave the president what he was looking for—with some differences.
Administration officials had pictured the new program, called Math Now, as being modeled on Reading First, the $1 billion-a-year federal effort that provides money for research-based improvements in reading instruction in the early grades.
But in the end, Congress’ vision differed. Math Now—included as part of a broader piece of legislation to support math and science education and research known as the America COMPETES Act, which Mr. Bush signed into law Aug. 9—is authorized to receive less half the amount the administration had wanted: $95 million a year, not $250 million.

City Audit Finds Underreporting of School Violence

Randi Weingarten:

[Editor’s note: City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. released an audit on Sept. 19 that found that many safety incidents in New York City public schools are not being reported as required under state law. For the 10 large high schools audited, 21 percent of the sampled incidents were not reported, including 14 percent of those incidents deemed serious.]
While we know the mayor and the chancellor want schools to be safe, this audit confirms a practice educators and the UFT have complained about for years: the failure to report all school incidents. Now with data driving all education decision-making, this audit couldn’t have come at a more important time.

Schools Within Schools: Possibilities and Pitfalls of High School Reform

Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready:

How effective is whole-school high school reform, such as the Schools-Within-Schools (SWS) model? What benefits does it have for students and in which areas does it fall short? This book seeks to answer these questions through the compelling stories of five public high schools that have embraced the SWS method. In order to fully understand the effectiveness of such a system, Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready have delved into every aspect of the reform in these settings, including participants’ reactions, curriculum structures, governance and leadership, and the allocation of students to the schools. The result is a thoughtful look at the SWS model that considers the benefits and problems of implementation, along with issues of equity and access.

Erick Robelen:

The idea that many U.S. high schools are too large and impersonal to serve students well has gained considerable credence in research and policy circles.
But starting over from scratch with thousands of small, stand-alone high schools is also often seen as expensive and impractical. As a result, many districts in recent years have pursued the cheaper option of simply breaking up their large high schools into smaller schools within schools.
A new book tells a cautionary tale about that understudied alternative, training its sights on five high schools examined closely over time. What emerges is largely a story of the differences between theory and reality, of what can go wrong if school officials aren’t careful, and of many missed opportunities to make the most of a smaller learning environment. Probably the single most salient finding of Schools Within Schools: Possibilities and Pitfalls of High School Reform is that the approach led to increased stratification of students by race, academic ability, and socioeconomic status. The authors also describe as surprisingly rare the cases of instructional innovation tied to the smaller structure.
The book says that, typically, the same campuses would have separate academies, or subunits, as the authors call them, ranging from those known to be “full of brains” to others that were deemed “dumping grounds” for weak students.
………..
The authors note that while there has been substantial research on high school size and small schools, “very little research” has specifically evaluated the effectiveness of the schools-within-schools model.
“Similar to many other educational reforms,” the book says, “the SWS reform has been promoted and implemented without a solid base of empirical evidence to support it.”

The implementation of “Small Learning Communities” within the current Madison high schools has been rather controversial.
Amazon: Schools Within Schools

Holes Found in U.S. Rules on Teachers

Debra Viadero:

New reports looking at how the teacher-quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are playing out in the nation’s classrooms suggest that, while compliance with the 5½-year-old federal law is widespread, problems and inequities persist and, in the end, labeling a teacher “highly qualified” is no guarantee of effectiveness.
“I think the high compliance rate suggests there were states that set the bar low and, in a way, grandfathered in a lot of teachers,” said Kerstin Carlson Lefloch, a primary author of “Teacher Quality Under NCLB: Interim Report,” a large-scale study released last week by the U.S. Department of Education [PDF]. “To get to the real story, you have to look below the surface, and that’s where we’re still seeing variation and still seeing inequities.”
Under the wide-ranging federal law, which is up for congressional reauthorization, states had until the end of this past school year to ensure that they were staffing 100 percent of their core academic classes with highly qualified teachers. Such teachers are defined as those who have a bachelor’s degree, are fully certified, and can show mastery of the subjects they teach, either by completing coursework, passing state subject-matter tests, or meeting some other state-set criteria.

Hidden method of reading revealed

Liz Seward:

The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists.
Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case.
In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously.
At the BA Festival of Science in York, the researchers also revealed that our brain can fuse two separate images to obtain a clear view of a page.
Sophisticated eye-tracking equipment allowed the team to pinpoint which letter a volunteer’s eyes focused on, when reading 14-point font from one metre away.

A Lost Art: Instilling Respect

Patricia Dalton:

There’s been a fundamental change in family life, and it has played out over the years in my office. Teachers, pediatricians and therapists like me are seeing children of all ages who are not afraid of their parents. Not one bit. Not of their power, not of their position, not of their ability to apply standards and enforce consequences.
I am not advocating authoritarian or abusive parental behavior, which can do untold damage. No, I am talking about a feeling that was common to us baby boomers when we were kids. One of my friends described it this way: “All my mother had to do was shoot me a look.” I knew exactly what she was talking about. It was a look that stopped us in our tracks — or got us moving. And not when we felt like it.
Now.
These days, that look seems to have been replaced by a feeble nod of parental acquiescence — and an earnest acknowledgment of “how hard it is to be a kid these days.”
In my office, I have seen small children call their parents names and tell them how stupid they are; I have heard adolescents use strings of expletives toward them; and I remember one 6-year-old whose parents told me he refused to obey, debated them ad nauseam and sometimes even lashed out. As if on cue, the boy kicked his father right there in the office. When I asked the father how he reacts at home, he told me that he runs to another room!

French & British Education Climate Update

The Economist:

Bac to School:

LADEN with hefty backpacks, French children filed back to school this week amid fresh agonising about the education system. Given its reputation for rigour and secular egalitarianism, and its well-regarded baccalauréat exam, this is surprising. What do the French think is wrong?
Quite a lot, to judge from a 30-page “letter to teachers [Lettre aux éducateurs 326K PDF Google Summary Ministry of Education]” just sent by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Too many school drop-outs; not enough respect or authority in the classroom (pupils, he says, should stand up when the teacher enters); too little value placed on the teaching profession; too little art and sport in the curriculum; too much passive rote-learning; and too much “theory and abstraction”. France, the president concludes, needs “to rebuild the foundations” of its education system.
The criticisms touch all levels. A government-commissioned report reveals that two in five pupils leave primary school with “serious learning gaps” in basic reading, writing and arithmetic. One in five finish secondary school with no qualification at all. Even the baccalauréat is under attack. This year’s pass rate of 83% is up from just over 60% in the early 1960s. “The bac is worth absolutely nothing,” asserts Jean-Robert Pitte, president of the Sorbonne-University of Paris IV.
Parent-Led Schools: B

Going beyond the call of duty to get good teaching
THE transition to secondary school is hard for children at the best of times. Imagine, then, that your precious baby must make a 90-minute journey across London twice a day, just to attend a school that has space only because locals have turned up their noses and gone elsewhere. Until this autumn, that was the prospect faced by many parents in West Norwood, South London. Not any more—and they can take the credit for improving their children’s lot.
On September 10th 180 of the neighbourhood’s 11-year-olds will start their secondary education in the school their parents built. Not quite with their bare hands—the local council, Lambeth, renovated a disused Victorian school to house them until their permanent home is finished in 2009. But certainly with their sweat, and even the occasional tear. For The Elmgreen School is Britain’s first state school to have been set up with parents—not a church, or business, or charity, or council—in the driving seat.
Latest Thinking on Education:

THE Conservative Party knows all too well that education is an emotive issue in British politics—indeed, perhaps the most emotive. In May a restatement of its line on selective grammar schools—that new ones would not be created by a future Tory government, just as they had not been by the last one—provoked a fortnight of internal strife.
The report of the party’s public-services policy group on September 4th is forcing the Tories to talk about education again. They will be grateful for its many sensible ideas. Setting (selecting classes by students’ ability in specific subjects) is a neat compromise between the inclusive aims of comprehensive secondary schools and grammar schools’ commitment to high-flying performance. There are measures to improve discipline, too.
Schools Unchained:

SOMETHING extraordinary is happening in London this week: in Lambeth, one of the city’s poorest boroughs, 180 children are starting their secondary education in a brand new school. The state-funded school was set up, without a fancy business sponsor, by parents who were fed up with the quality of local education. In countries with more enlightened education systems, this would be unremarkable. In Britain, it is an amazing achievement by a bunch of desperate and determined people after years of struggle (see article).
Britain’s schools are in a mess. Although British schoolchildren perform reasonably well compared with those in other countries, average standards are not improving despite billions in extra spending, and a stubbornly long tail of underachievers straggles behind. A couple of years ago, a consensus emerged among reformers that councils had too much control and parents too little. There was radical talk in both main parties of encouraging parental choice as the best way to drive up standards: if schoolchildren were free to vote with their feet, taking public funding with them, new schools would open and existing ones would improve in order to compete.

Wisconsin Open Enrollment Closed to White Madison Students

Andy Hall covers a potent issue:

If he lived anywhere else in Wisconsin, Zachary Walton, 12, wouldn’t have this problem.
If he were black, Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian, Zachary wouldn’t have this problem, either.
But he’s in Madison, where growing numbers of white students are discovering that because of their race, the state’s open enrollment program actually is closed.
“I feel like I’m left out,” said Zachary, who wants to attend a public online school — one like his big brother Daniel, 15, enjoys.
Last week, when most students across Wisconsin began a new school year, Zachary began his second year of home schooling in his family’s East Side apartment.
Madison officials, supported by the state Department of Public Instruction, have ruled that Zachary and 125 other students living in the district must stay put this year in the name of racial integration.
The policy is enforced even for dozens of students, such as Zachary, who don’t attend public school but instead go to private schools or receive home schooling.
Laura and Mike Starks, Zachary’s mother and stepfather, believe that Madison and DPI are going overboard. And that it’s depriving Zachary of one-on-one attention needed for him to catch up academically.
“If we had the money, we would have aggressively fought this,” Mike Starks said.

Much more on Wisconsin’s Open Enrollment Law here.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:

The headline in Sunday’s paper – “You can’t transfer, white kids told” – could just as easily have been “School district refuses to re-segregate” or “School district complies with spirit of Brown decision.” Of course, that would not be nearly as provocative as the one designed to sell more papers and allow members of the white community to believe they have fewer privileges than families of color.
School district officials are not ignorant. They know that if every transfer request is granted, some of our schools will become even more racially segregated and inequitable.
Also, it is interesting that your story focuses on the 140 denials rather than the 286 acceptances and, more specifically, on the 77 out of 140 denials that used racial balance as a reason for the denial.
Incidentally, my own daughter was denied a transfer in 1999. I guess if she were white we could have had a feature story about it.

Charles Staeven:

Madison’s enrollment policy racist
I was appalled by the front page of Sunday’s State Journal. Madison, the supposed bastion of progressive thought, has the only school district in the state that is working under a racist policy when it comes to open enrollment.
Even worse, District Administrator Art Rainwater believes his hands are tied. His “we are powerless” statements when facing a blatantly in-your-face racist policy indicate poor leadership.
Please recall Dr. King’s message that it’s not the color of one’s skin, and I believe he meant any color. Come on, get out of the kids’ way!

Pro / Con on Appleton Charter Schools

Tim Maylander:

As a former charter school student, I can attest to how valuable they can be to a child’s education. When they’re properly planned, a charter school can give a student exactly what he or she needs to succeed later on in life. I feel I owe many of my present successes to my charter school upbringing.
However, we need to cut back on the number of educational options in Wisconsin, specifically in the Fox Valley.
In the last decade, there has been an explosion of charter schools in Appleton alone. Programs like the Classical Charter School, Magellan Charter School, Tesla Engineering School and the Renaissance School for the Arts are examples of the numerous alternative schooling opportunities now available to parents and their children.
Despite my earlier comments about the good qualities of charter schools, the increasing number of programs isn’t beneficial to anyone, especially the student. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing.
Take the charter school I participated in, for example. When most kids would have gone to middle school, my parents opted to send me to the Magellan program. It allowed gifted students to take classes at a high school setting with high school teachers at an accelerated pace.
Not only did the Magellan students learn a great deal more about traditional subjects then they would have normally, they were also exposed to a world of new opportunities at Appleton West, where the program was located. Students in the program were allowed to join the debate team as well as many other character-building activities and organizations.
Magellan was exactly what the students needed — accelerated learning in a high school locale with endless possibilities for development.

Sara Hetland:

A visit to a public school classroom will reveal the immense range of learning styles among students.
There’s the boy sitting seemingly idle in the back corner. He says little, but his test scores indicate he’s among the intellectually gifted.
In the middle of the room is the student who can play anything he wishes on the piano, but simply can’t comprehend long division.
There’s the student who finds it difficult to learn from a lecture, but she makes great academic strides while doing a hands-on project.
Charter schools allow for more academic freedom. They’re publicly funded schools that have been released from some of the regulations that apply to other public schools, and instead are accountable for producing certain results written in the school’s charter.
Charter schools can avoid many of the procedural obstacles that distract other schools’ resources and energy away from the goal of education. Diversity in learning styles, a sense of community and potential benefits to public schools make expanding charter schools in the Fox Valley a good decision.
One reason why charter schools should be expanded is to address the diversity in learning styles.

Paying Parents to “Do the Right Thing”

Raina Kelley:

Paying kids for good grades is a popular (if questionable) parenting tactic. But when school starts next week, New York City will try to use the same enticement to get parents in low-income neighborhoods more involved in their children’s education and overall health. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has raised more than $40 million (much of it from his own money and the Rockefeller Foundation) to pay families a modest amount for small tasks—$50 for getting a library card or $100 to take a child to the dentist—that could make a big difference.
The experimental program, called Opportunity NYC, is modeled on a 10-year-old Mexican program called Oportunidades, which has been so successful in reducing poverty in rural areas that it has been adopted by more than 20 countries, including Argentina and Turkey. International studies have found that these programs raise school enrollment and vaccination rates and lower the number of sick days students take

Do culture-themed public schools cross a legal line?

Nathanial Popper:

When the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy opened four years ago in suburban Minneapolis, the school was a bold experiment and its survival was in question. There was the scramble to attract students that any charter school faces, but Tarek ibn Ziyad had the additional worry of a constitutional challenge, given the school’s sponsorship by a nonprofit called Islamic Relief and the curriculum’s emphasis on Muslim culture and the Arabic language.
The school has not only survived but thrived, and there are plans for local expansion. Perhaps the surest sign that the experiment worked came last week, when a new charter school opened up thousands of miles away in Hollywood, Fla.–founded by Jewish parents, Ben Gamla Charter School has kosher food in the cafeteria and Hebrew posters in the classrooms. In the planning of the Florida school, Tarek ibn Ziyad’s experience was taken into account.
The success of Tarek ibn Ziyad’s model, and its adoption outside of Minnesota, heralds a potentially explosive new trend in America’s charter schools: publicly funded schools tied to a particular religion. The founders of Ben Gamla are already promising more branches in other states, and parents from other religions are sure to venture into similar territory, pushing the constitutional limits even further. As Peter Deutsch, the Orthodox Jewish congressman who started Ben Gamla, has said, it “could be a huge paradigm shift in education in America

Views on Wisconsin’s K-12 School Spending

Frank Lassee:

The third Friday of September is an important date for schools. On that day the final enrollment count is made, then each school district will move to finalize their annual budget. Having the school budgets final by mid October is important for all of us, especially property taxpayers.
Under current law, schools will be allowed to spend $264 more for each student than last year. That is what the Governor and Democratic Senators proposed, as well. The Assembly has shaved it back to $200 per kid each year of the budget (with an incentive of $264 if the teachers agree to negotiate for a less expensive health plan). Last year in Wisconsin, we spent almost $10 billion on our public schools, approximately $5 Billion of state taxes, $4 Billion of local property taxes and $1 Billion from the federal government.

Paul Soglin:

Wisconsin State Representative Frank Lasee (R-2nd) needs to go back to school. I suppose it is an intended public service that he tells us that, “Education is by far the single biggest expense of our state budget.”
O.K. Interesting information, but he never tells us what is the proper level of spending, or for that matter, why home owners should pay more so that businesses can pay less for education.
He makes additional observations such as the fact that, “Total spending divided by the number of teachers works out to nearly $150,000 for each teacher.”
Huh? What does that mean? Lasee thinks that the cost of busing kids to school or the cost of school books is to be measured by the cost per teacher. A figure as useful as knowing the cost of postage to mail a letter to the moon. Most of his comments continue with measures and data that are meaningless, either with no context or a useless context.

Much more on K-12 spending here.

Beloit College’s Mindset List® for the Class of 2011

Beloit College:

Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.
# What Berlin wall?
# Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.

Cathy Lynn Grossman has more:

For this fall’s incoming college class, “off the hook” could mean “excellent” or escaping blame, but for sure it has nothing to do with telephones.
“Here’s Johnny!” That’s Jack Nicholson in The Shining, not the intro for Johnny Carson’s monologue, according to today’s 18-year-olds.
Professors had best update their lingo if they want to communicate with the Class of 2011 (on the assumption that anyone actually finishes in four years anymore).
Here to help is the 10th annual Beloit College Mindset List, released today by the small Wisconsin liberal arts college.

Back to School Picnic

100 Black Men of Madison:

100 Black Men of Madison 11th Annual Back to School Picnic will be held this Saturday August 25th, rain or shine at Demetral Park located on Commercial and Packers Avenue at 11 am.
Over 2,000 free backpacks filled with school supplies will be distributed to students in kindergarten thru eighth grade.
In addition, hamburgers, hot dogs and beverages will be served. This event is first come, first served and students must be in attendance to receive a backpack.
The purpose of this event is to assist students at the beginning the school year with the supplies needed for academic success and to reduce the achievement gap.
For more information please contact, Chris Canty at 244-1259 or cwcanty@gmail.com.

Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email.

Teachers in Trouble – Parents Ignored, Part II

Jay Matthews:

For a long time, Dawn Mosisa had trouble forgiving herself for the way she shrugged off her daughter’s story about the teacher who hit one of her second grade classmates in the spring of 2003. Her daughter said the man ordered the class to count to 10 in French while he hit the boy 10 times with a ruler.
The girl was not in the habit of making up such stories, the mother said, but like most parents, Mosisa did not want to think that any educator would be so cruel, so she chose not to believe it. When the teacher left the school the next year, Mosisa grew more concerned. But she said she could not get anyone at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville to explain to her or her child exactly what had occurred and how they should respond.
Abuse of a student at school is a parent’s nightmare. Not only do such incidents harm the victims and their parents, but they also trouble the children who may have witnessed the event and their parents. Such cases usually remain undisclosed because parents do not want their children embarrassed or disturbed by public knowledge of what happened. But Mosisa, 44, a student financial services official for a public university, has given an unusually detailed account that sheds light on a rarely examined side of public education.

Where does MMSD get its numbers from?

One of the reasons that I have devoted more time than I should to analyzing the outcomes from the District’s SLC grants (way too much time, given that I don’t get paid for this and given that the District is going to continue on its merry way with restructuring our high schools into Small Learning Communities no matter what the data indicates) has to do with the frustration I experience when I try and find consistency in the District’s data. Frankly, there isn’t any. MMSD is consistently inconsistent with their numbers, see for example my earlier post trying to identify what the District spent in 2004/05.
The District’s latest press release trumpeting the success of our high school students on the ACT is just the latest example of this problem. According to MMSD, the percentage of Madison students who took the ACT is significantly higher than the percentages that are reported by DPI.
The District reports that “Sixty-nine percent of all MMSD 12th grade students participated in the ACT during 2006-07, compared to 70% last year. Over the last 13 years, MMSD participation has ranged from 67-74% (see pg. 2 table).”

ACT Score Comparison by Year
Average Composite:

                                    %MMSD 12th
 Year     Madison   WI     US     Graders Tested 
2006-07    24.6     22.3    21.2        69%
2005-06    24.2     22.2    21.1        70%
2004-05    24.3     22.2    20.9        74%
2003-04    24.2     22.2    20.9        70%
2002-03    23.9     22.2    20.8        68%
2001-02    24.4     22.2    20.8        67%
2000-01    24.1     22.2    21.0        70%
1999-00    24.2     22.2    21.0        72%
1998-99    24.4     22.3    21.0        67%
1997-98    24.5     22.3    21.0        67%
1996-97    24.5     22.3    21.0        70%
1995-96    23.8     22.1    20.9        71%
1994-95    23.5     22.0    20.8        70%

According to DPI, a much smaller percentage of the District’s 12th graders have taken the ACT in their junior or senior years. (The table below is taken from DPI)

ACT Results – Composite – All Students Madison Metropolitan
	Enrollment Grade 12	Number Tested	% Tested	Average Score – Composite
1996-97	1,552	982	63.3	24.5
1997-98	1,650	1,016	61.6	24.5
1998-99	1,639	1,014	61.9	24.4
1999-00	1,697	1,127	66.4	24.2
2000-01	1,728	1,091	63.1	24.1
2001-02	1,785	1,113	62.4	24.4
2002-03	1,873	1,126	60.1	23.9
2003-04	1,920	1,198	62.4	24.2
2004-05	2,055	1,247	60.7	24.3
2005-06	2,035	1,244	61.1	24.2
2006-07	1,983	1,151	58.0	24.6

An examination of minority student participation in the ACT reveals that the percentage of African American and Hispanic students taking the test has declined over the last three years. Only 20.1% of African American students in the District took the ACT as compared to 34.6% of African American students across the state.
I am more than willing to believe that DPI’s numbers are inaccurate, but don’t they get this data from the District? Several months ago I was attempting to clarify discrepancies between MMSD and DPI in the cost per student data, and that experience is perhaps informative here. I wrote to clarify this issue:

I am writing to ask about the data that the district lists on its web site regarding cost per pupil. The excel spreadsheet t1.xls on the page (http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/re/dataprofile.htm) lists numbers that do not match those listed on DPI’s web site (http://data.dpi.state.wi.us/data/selschool.asp). Specifically, the numbers that MMSD lists as the state average cost per student are greater than the numbers that DPI lists on its site, while at the same time the MMSD cost per student listed is less than what DPI states that our District spends per student.
I am attaching the spreadsheet I downloaded from the District web site, along with the numbers that I got from DPI. If you could help me understand the discrepancy in these numbers it would be most appreciated.

The response that I got back from Roger Price was:

Jeff,
Both data sources are from the DPI. They calculate both tables. I am not sure what the differences are between the two. We utilize the “Basic Facts” data as published by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Roger

Why the District with its extensive Data Warehouse has to rely on the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance to tell it what they spend per student is beyond me, but it doesn’t fill me with any confidence about the accuracy of their data.

District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 3

Because the recent MMSD Small Learning Communities (SLC) grant submission failed to include any discussion of the success or failure of the SLC initiatives already undertaken at Memorial and West High Schools, I have been examining the data that was (or in some cases should have been) provided to the Department of Education in the final reports of those previous grants. Earlier postings have examined the data from Memorial and the academic achievement data at West. It is now time to turn our attention to the data on Community and Connection, the other major goal of the West SLC grant.
West’s SLC grant, which ran from 2003/04 to 2005/06 (and highlighted in the tables below), targeted 6 goals in the area of increasing community and connection amongst their students.

2.a. Suspension and Expulsion data
2.b. Safe and Supportive Climate
2.c. Stakeholder Perceptions
2.d. Extracurricular Participation
2.e. Student Leadership
2.f. Parent Participation

The available data suggest that West’s restructuring has not had the anticipated effect on these measures. While I have been more than skeptical about the impact of the SLC restructuring on academic performance, I did expect that there would be positive changes in school climate, so I am surprised and disappointed at the data.
2.a. Suspension and Expulsion data -The final report claims that “Progress has been made overall for both suspensions and expulsions at West High.” We reach a very different conclusion when we examine the data available from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). I don’t know what to make of the large discrepancies in the numbers reported by West in their final report and those on the DPI website (West reports a much higher number of suspensions), but I am inclined to believe that the data DPI collected from the District is the data we should rely on. That data shows that number of students suspended and more importantly the percentage of students suspended has actually increased over the time course of the SLC grant. Note that percentages are the more appropriate statistic to examine because they take into account the number of students enrolled which has declined over this period of time.

	Total Suspensions West Final Report	Total Suspensions DPI WINSS Data	Suspensions (% of Students) DPI WINSS Data	African Am. Suspensions West Final Report	African Am. Suspensions DPI WINSS Data	African Am. Suspensions (% of Students) DPI WINSS Data
2000/01	280	189	9.0%	100	71	23.1%
2001/02	265	154	7.3%	145	82	26.0%
2002/03	230	142	6.6%	115	71	24.0%
2003/04	255	142	6.7%	147	79	27.6%
2004/05	160	159	7.5%	90	89	28.1%
2005/06	not reported	181	8.9%	not reported	98	34.6%

Examining the suspension data on the DPI website revealed that the increases in the suspension rates amongst West High students were particularly pronounced for 9th and 10th grade students – the students specifically targeted by the SLC restructuring and implementation of a core curriculum.

Suspension Data for 9th & 10th Graders
	9th Grade Suspensions	10th Grade Suspensions
2000/01	13.1%	8.5%
2001/02	9.9%	9.3%
2002/03	10.2%	6.4%
2003/04	11.0%	9.3%
2004/05	11.3%	9.9%
2005/06	14.8%	10.1%

2.b. Safe and Supportive Climate – This goal was supposed to be assessed by examining changes in ratings of physical and emotional safety and school connected-ness on the District climate survey. Although climate data is supposedly collected from students each year, this data is not presented in West’s Final Report. However, information presented in the recent MMSD proposal suggests that there haven’t been any changes at West. In that proposal, it is noted that 53% of West students agreed with the statement “I am an important part of my school community.” This percentage is essentially unchanged from the 52% of students in 2001/02 whom West said reported feeling attached to their school, when the school applied for their initial SLC grant.

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US Drops Out of International Math & Science Study (TIMMS)

Peg Tyre:

Americans took note when Bill Gates said last spring that American schools needed to beef up science and math standards if the country was going to maintain a competitive edge in the new century. So did Congress, which last week approved legislation called the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science) Act, which carves out a whopping $43.6 billion for science education and research.
So why did the federal government quietly decide last year to drop out of an international study that would compare U.S. high-school students who take advanced science and math courses with their international counterparts?
The study, called TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study) Advanced 2008, measures how high-school seniors are doing in algebra, geometry, calculus and physics with students taking similar subjects around the globe. In the past, the American results have been shockingly poor. In the last survey, taken in 1995, students from only two countries—Cyprus and South Africa—scored lower than U.S. school kids.

Joanne has more.

In Hong Kong, Flashy Tutors Gain Icon Status

Jonathan Cheng:

When Richard Eng isn’t teaching English grammar to high-school students, he might be cruising around Hong Kong in his Lamborghini Murciélago. Or in Paris, on one of his seasonal shopping sprees. Or relaxing in his private, custom-installed karaoke room festooned with giant Louis Vuitton logos.
Mr. Eng, 43 years old, is one of Hong Kong’s best-known celebrity “tutor gods.”
Hong Kong parents are often desperate to help their children succeed in this city’s pressure-cooker public-examination system, which determines students’ college-worthiness. That explains why many are willing to pay handsomely for extracurricular help. Mr. Eng and others like him have made a lucrative business out of tapping that demand. They use flashy, aggressive marketing tactics that have transformed them into scholastic pop stars — “tutor gods,” as they’re known in Cantonese.
Private tutoring is big business around the world. Programs that help people prepare for standardized tests — such as SAT-prep courses in the U.S. — have become a multibillion-dollar industry. Tutoring agencies are also booming in places like mainland China and Japan. Several years ago, Hong Kong’s government estimated that the city’s families spent nearly half a billion dollars a year on tutoring.
Hong Kong stands out, though, for instructors who boldly tout their success rate — and their own images. They pay to have their faces plastered throughout the city on 40-foot-high billboards and the sides of double-decker buses. They’re also known for buying ads that take up the entire front page of newspapers — space more commonly filled by banks and property developers. One local television station is even preparing to launch a fictional drama series based on the lives of the tutor gods.

Fascinating

The Tough Road to Better Science Teaching

Jeffrey Brainard:

The principal effort is led by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2003 the NSF gave the university a five-year, $10-million grant to establish the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning. The center has worked with more than 1,000 new faculty members and graduate students at Madison and other universities to try the new teaching methods and conduct research on the process of putting them into practice.
The project also works on ways to attract science professors to join in the innovation. Trying the new teaching methods, the center’s leaders say, should be viewed as conducting an experiment with measurable results — an approach that appeals to the instincts of researchers. Organizers also argue that the new methods are more professionally satisfying than delivering conventional lectures.
Observers hope that the Wisconsin project will show results different from those of a similar NSF-financed effort that ran from 1993 to 2002. An evaluation of that program found that participants, who were graduate students, rated it highly but felt pressure to “conceal” the work from their professors, who viewed it as distracting them from research. What’s more, the new teaching methods often did not take root in the students’ departments, which was a goal of the project.
If young researchers delay trying the new teaching methods until their careers are established, though, they may put the attempt off for good, advocates say. And if American science is to stay competitive, that is a problem. “We don’t really have the time to wait around for another 20 years,” says Madison’s Ms. Millar, “for this kind of sea change to occur.”

Via Kevin Carey.

District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2

An earlier posting examined the results of the small school initiative at Memorial high school. This post aims to examine West’s SLC grant. Similar to the Memorial grant, the goal of West’s SLC grant was to reduce the achievement gap and to increase students’ sense of community.
The final report is a major source of frustration for anyone who values data analysis and statistics. Essentially, there are no statistics reported. The data is presented in figures that are cluttered and too small, which makes them difficult to interpret. Changes over time are discussed as trends without any sort of statistical tests being reported. Most of the data presented are no more detailed than what anyone can pull off the DPI web site.
Before examining the impact of West’s restructuring on student achievement and on students’ connection to the school, it is necessary to identify just a few of the components of the West proposal that were never enacted:

“C.2.c Advocate Mentor. Each student will have an adult advocate from their learning community (LC) who stays with them through their years at West. Students will meet weekly with their advocate to review academic progress and attendance, preview the upcoming week, discuss school or personal issues, etc.” A rather ambitious aspect of the proposal, and considering District finances a totally unrealistic proposal. It was not implemented.
“C.2.d. Academic/Career Pathways. Beginning early in freshman year, each student will work with their LC guidance counselor and parent(s) to develop an Individualized Graduation Plan (IGP) that includes (1) personal, academic, and career/avocation exploration goals, and (2) academic coursework and learning experiences beyond the classroom that help students achieve these goals. Updated periodically, the IGP will be based on the student’s academic record and a current assessment of their skills and competencies, intellectual interests, and personality.” As far as I know, this never happened, at the very least parents were never involved.
“C.5.e. Strategies for securing/maintaining staff, community, and parent buy-in. … We will provide frequent formal (e.g., surveys, focus groups) and informal chances for staff and other stakeholders to raise concerns with the project leadership (Principal and hired project staff).” Parents were never surveyed and the only focus groups that I am aware of were two meetings conducted following parents’ uproar over English 10 …
“The SLC Coordinator will also provide frequent progress reports through a variety of school and community-based media (e.g., special staff newsletter and memos from the principal; school newsletter sent home; media coverage of positive developments, etc.). Also our community partners will serve as ambassadors for the project via communications to their respective constituencies.” There were two presentations to the PTSO summarizing the results of the grant. I am not aware of anything in the school newsletter or in the “media” that reported on the results of the restructuring.
“E.1 Overall Evaluation Strategy
Third-Party Evaluator. … He will develop survey instruments and analyze the formative and summative data described below, and prepare annual reports of his findings for all stakeholder groups. Parents (one of the stakeholders) never received annual reports from the evaluator, and I have no idea about what surveys were or were not developed …
Also the outcome data for West will be compared to the same data elements for a school with similar demographic characteristics that is not restructuring into learning communities.” Rather than comparing West’s outcome data to a comparable school, the final report compares West’s data to the District’s data.
Finally, one of the goals of the grant (2.f. Parent Participation) was to increase the % of parents of color who attend school functions. This data was to come from attendance logs collected by the LC Assistant Principals. This objective is not even listed as one of the goals on the Final Report, and if attendance at PTSO meetings is any indicator, the SLC grant had no impact on the participation of parents of color. It is interesting to note that the recently submitted high school redesign grant does not include any efforts at increasing parental participation. Given the extensive literature on the importance of parental involvement, especially for low income students (see the recent meta analysis by Jeynes (2007) in Urban Education, Vol. 42, pp. 82-110), it is disappointing to see that the District has given up on this goal.

On to the data…

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Waukesha Virtual School Generates a Cash Surplus

Amy Hetzner:

The School District’s virtual high school has delivered its first financial surplus to the school system more than a year after it faced an uncertain future amid budgetary losses.
The district received about $65,000 more than it spent on the 3-year-old school, called iQ Academies at Wisconsin, for 2006-’07 in the first year of a renegotiated contract with KC Distance Learning, the private company that manages the virtual high school.
The school raised about $4 million through the state’s open enrollment system; special-education and tuition payments; and student fees, said Erik Kass, Waukesha’s executive director of business services. A little more than $1.5 million of that revenue went to the School District, which pays employee salaries and benefits as well as some supply costs for iQ.
In a report Monday to members of the School Board’s Finance and Facilities Committee, district officials attributed the financial turnaround to a change in the revenue-sharing arrangement with the company as well as better cost controls in the recently ended school year.

Building ‘Smart Education Systems’

Robert Rothman:

As the unprecedented push to improve American education enters the midpoint of its third decade, reformers can claim some success. Yet no one would argue that the job is done, particularly in the nation’s cities. Even the most successful urban school districts, the winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, would acknowledge that they have a long way to go toward ensuring that every child receives an excellent education and develops the knowledge and skills needed for a fulfilling and productive future.
There is no shortage of ideas for improving urban education, and there are efforts under way in nearly every city to improve schooling for urban youths: New schools are proliferating, high schools are being redesigned, new curricula are being developed and implemented, accountability systems are being strengthened, and much more. But there is also a growing recognition that improving schools and school systems, while essential, is not enough. Ensuring that every child becomes proficient and beyond will require the support and active engagement of organizations and agencies outside of schools as well.
The role of out-of-school factors in educational success has sparked heated debate. But the debate over whether in-school or out-of-school factors are more salient in children’s learning—a debate that has raged at least since the 1966 publication of James S. Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity—is in many respects a false one. Both factors are important, and both must be addressed if the nation is to fulfill its 60-year-old promise of equal educational opportunity, and its more recent pledge to ensure that all children learn to high levels.
The experiences of middle-class and affluent children make this proposition clear. To be sure, relatively affluent students tend to have schooling advantages that support higher levels of learning. Numerous studies have documented the disparities in school facilities, teacher quality, and curriculum offerings that favor more-advantaged students.

Let’s get real about Indiana school data

Indianapolis Star-Tribune Editorial:

At the beginning of the 2005-06 school year, there were 969 seniors left in Indianapolis Public Schools’ graduating class.
By the end of the school year, nearly 1,300 seniors collected diplomas from the district.
Yes, you read that correctly. IPS had 33 percent more graduates than seniors who began the year, the second consecutive school year it has done so.
There’s no way that IPS, which promoted a mere 31 percent of the eighth-graders who made up the original graduating class, experienced a sudden influx of transfers. The fact that just 52 of them would have graduated the previous year shows that holdovers don’t account for this.
As the nonprofit Education Trust notes in a report released today, parents and state officials “cannot allow such dubious figures to go unexplained — or unchallenged.”
That admonition must also extend to the Indiana Department of Education and its boss, Superintendent Suellen Reed. After all, IPS’ graduation numbers reflect the agency’s longstanding difficulty in accurately reporting the condition of education in our state.

Education Trust:

GRADUATION MATTERS: How NCLB allows states to set the bar too low for improving high school grad rates.

“The first ingredient in education reform is to tell parents the truth.”
Lawrie Kobza’s Performance & Achievement Committee discussed “A Model to Measure Student Performance” Monday evening.

Cartoonist among role models for high school boys.

Oh, that every one of our high schools had a “AAA” (“African American Achievement”) Team. —LAF
Susan Troller
The Capital Times
8/1/2007
The only guy who can truly hold you back is the guy in the mirror,” cartoonist Robb Armstrong told a group of mostly male, mostly African-American students at La Follette High School on Tuesday.
He is the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip JumpStart, which focuses on an African-American family and until recently ran in the Wisconsin State Journal. He was in Madison, speaking to members of the African-American Achievement Team, based at La Follette.
Armstrong grew up in a tough West Philadelphia neighborhood with his fiercely ambitious mother and four siblings.
An advocate for education who talks to over 5,000 students a year, Armstrong held his audience spellbound for about an hour as he talked about his family, his friends and the hard choices he had to make to pursue his passion as a cartoonist.

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District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 1

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) recently submitted a five year, $5 million grant proposal to the US Department of Education (DOE) to support the creation of Small Learning Communities (SLCs) in all four high schools (See here for post re. grant application). While the grant proposal makes mention of the two smaller SLC grants the district received earlier, there is no examination of the data from those two projects. One would think that DOE would be curious to know if MMSD’s earlier efforts at creating SLCs had produced the desired results before agreeing to provide further funding. Furthermore, one would think it important to examine if the schools implemented the changes that they proposed in their applications. It is my intention to provide some of that analysis over the course of several posts, and I want to encourage other community members to examine the Memorial grant proposal and final report and the West grant and final report themselves.
We begin by examining Memorial High School’s SLC grant which was funded from 2000-2003. Memorial’s SLC grant is a good place to start, not only because it was the first MMSD SLC grant, but because they lay out clearly the outcome measures that they intend to evaluate and their final report provides hard numbers (as opposed to graphics) over a number of years before and after the implementation of the SLC grant. Memorial had two goals for their SLC grant: 1) to reduce the achievement gap and 2) to increase students’ connectedness to the school.
Examining student achievement suggests mixed results for Memorial’s restructuring. Student GPA’s indicate a slight narrowing of the achievement gap for African American students and essentially no change for Hispanic students when compared to their fellow white students over the period of the grant.

Difference Between	2000	2001	2002	2003
White & African American	1.35	1.35	1.16	1.24
White & Hispanic	0.75	0.87	0.74	0.79

Student WKCE performance can be considered an external indicator of student success, and these data indicate no change in the proportion of students scoring at the Proficient and/or Advanced levels, an especially noteworthy result given that the criteria for the WKCEs were lowered in 2002/03 which was the last year of the grant. I’ve included data up through this past school year since that is available on the DPI website, and I’ve only presented data from math and reading in the interests of not overloading SIS readers.

WKCE	99/2000	2000/01	2001/02	2002/03	2003/04	2004/05	2005/06	2006/07
Reading
African American	45.09	54.90	36.00	33.00	40.5	45.8	42.9	29.8
Hispanic	63.16	80.00	47.00	54.00	53.6	51.7*	53.1*	29.3*
White	93.33	85.55	86.00	89.00	90.2	86.2	89.0	84.2
Low Income	53.33	56.36	36.00	36.00	32.9	40.7	43.7	25.7
Not Low Income				88.00	86.9	84.7	89.8	80.2
Math
African American	18.00	27.45	20.00	29.00**	39.2	32.2	27.3	39.4
Hispanic	42.11	40.00	33.00	49.00	42.9	62.1*	59.4*	36.2*
White	77.44	76.48	68.00	90.00	89.7	89.3	89.0	86.4
Low Income	18.64	16.37	16.00	29.00**	29.4	38.4	38.7	35.7
Not Low Income				90	85.8	86.9	89.2	84.2

* note. data for Hispanic students includes 4 Native American students in 03/04 and 2 in the following two years
** note. DPI actually reports higher percentages of students scoring proficient/advanced: 34% and 37% respectively for these two cells
The data from DPI looking at ACT test performance and percentage of students tested does not suggest any change has occurred in the last 10 years, so the data presented here would suggest that Memorial’s SLC restructuring hasn’t had any effect on the achievement gap, but what about the other goal, student connectedness?

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“Value Added Assessment” Madison School Board’s Performance & Achievement Committee Looks at “A Model to Measure Student Performance”

Video / 20MB Mp3 Audio

Superintendent Art Rainwater gave a presentation on “Value Added Assessment” to the Madison School Board’s Performance & Achievement committee Monday evening. Art described VAA “as a method to track student growth longitudinally over time and to utilize that data to look at how successful we are at all levels of our organization”. MMSD CIO Kurt Kiefer, Ernie Morgan, Mike Christian and Rob Meyer, a senior scientist at WCER presented this information to the committee (there were two others whose names I could not decipher from the audio).

No Standards Left Behind

Neal McCluskey:

NCLB’s biggest problem is that it’s designed to help Washington politicians appear all things to all people. To look tough on bad schools, it requires states to establish standards and tests in reading, math and science, and it requires all schools to make annual progress toward 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. To preserve local control, however, it allows states to set their own standards, “adequate yearly progress” goals, and definitions of proficiency. As a result, states have set low standards, enabling politicians to declare victory amid rising test scores without taking any truly substantive action.
NCLB’s perverse effects are illustrated by Michigan, which dropped its relatively demanding standards when it had over 1,500 schools on NCLB’s first “needs improvement” list. The July 2002 transformation of then-state superintendent Tom Watkins captures NCLB’s power. Early that month, when discussing the effects of state budget cuts on Michigan schools, Mr. Watkins declared that cuts or no cuts, “We don’t lower standards in this state!” A few weeks later, thanks to NCLB, Michigan cut drastically the percentage of students who needed to hit proficiency on state tests for a school to make adequate yearly progress. “Michigan stretches to do what’s right with our children,” Mr. Watkins said, “but we’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Today, evasion syndrome is epidemic. According to a report last month from the Institute of Education Sciences, a research branch of the U.S. Department of Education, while states are declaring success on their tests, almost none have standards even close to those of the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress — the so-called “Nation’s Report Card.” Almost all states have set their standards below NAEP’s “proficiency” level.

Governance Changes in the Milwaukee Public Schools

Alan Borsuk:

A surge of action and proposed action, a president who wants his hands on a lot of things and bad blood between board members – the heat is growing at Milwaukee School Board meetings, and it is creating an environment in which Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is facing the stiffest political challenges of his five years in office.
The election in April of Michael Bonds to replace Ken Johnson on the board, followed by the election of Peter Blewett as the board’s president, have put into power two people with strong feelings about doing things differently from the way Andrekopoulos wants.
And they are acting on those feelings.
A central role for the board president is to name members of the committees that do most of the board’s work. The president usually gives his allies the dominant positions but doesn’t put himself in many roles.
Blewett has done much more than that – he named himself chairman of two committees, one that handles the budget and strategic direction of Milwaukee Public Schools and one that handles questions of policy and rules, and he named himself as a member of two other major committees, handling finance and safety. He also named Bonds to head the Finance Committee, an unusual step, given that Bonds was brand new.
Blewett and Bonds, who have formed a generally close relationship, have also been submitting a relative flood of proposals for the board to take up. Since May 1, the two have submitted 34 resolutions between them, with nine others coming from the other seven members of the board.
Some seek major changes in MPS practices or to reopen issues previously decided by the board. Included would be reopening Juneau High School, reuniting Washington High School into one operation (it has been broken into three), restoring ninth-grade athletics and building up arts programs in schools.
The total of 43 resolutions is more than board members submitted in the entire year in six of the eight previous years. Seventeen resolutions were introduced at a board meeting last week, 14 of them written or co-written by Blewett or Bonds.
Although this might seem like a bureaucratic matter, it is a key element of efforts by Blewett and Bonds to shake up the central administration of MPS. They are challenging Andrekopoulos openly in ways not seen in prior years, when a firm majority of board members supported Andrekopoulos.
He and Bonds have been critical of Andrekopoulos and the previous board for not doing enough to listen to people in the city as a whole and for not providing enough information to the board.
Blewett said his main agenda item as president is “to engage the community.” Just holding public hearings or meetings around the community is not enough, he said, referring to a round of community meetings last fall on a new strategic plan for MPS as “spectacular wastes of time and money.” He said people who work in schools, parents and the community in general need meaningful involvement.
“I really want to make sure that we’re investigating every opportunity to engage the public and provide our students with quality learning experiences that get beyond reading and math,” he said.
Bonds said, “I have a very aggressive agenda to change the direction of the School District.”
He was strongly critical of policies such as the redesigning of high schools led by Andrekopoulos in recent years, including the creation of numerous small high schools.
“Given the resources we (MPS) have, we should be providing a better product,” he said. “I feel the administration has led us down a failed path.”

There are similar issues at play in Madison. The local school board’s composition has significantly changed over the past few years – much for the better. Time will tell, whether that governance change translates into a necessary new direction for our $339M+, 24, 342 student Madison School District. Alan Borsuk is a Madison West High Grad.

CUNY Plans to Raise Its Admissions Standards: “the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared””

Karen Arenson:

The City University of New York is beginning a drive to raise admissions requirements at its senior colleges, its first broad revision since its trustees voted to bar students needing remedial instruction from its bachelor’s degree programs nine years ago.
In 2008, freshmen will have to show math SAT scores 20 to 30 points higher than they do now to enter the university’s top-tier colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — and its six other senior colleges.
Students now can also qualify for the bachelor’s degree programs with satisfactory scores on the math Regents examination or on placement tests; required cutoffs for those tests will also be raised.
Open admissions policies at the community colleges will be unaffected.
“We are very serious in taking a group of our institutions and placing them in the top segment of universities and colleges,” said Matthew Goldstein, the university chancellor, who described the plan in an interview. “That is the kind of profile we want for our students.”
Dr. Goldstein said that the English requirements for the senior colleges would be raised as well, but that the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared.”

Speaking of Math, I’m told that the MMSD’s Math Task Force did not obtain the required NSF Grant. [PDF Overview, audio / video introduction] and Retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater’s response to the School Board’s first 2006-2007 Performance Goal:

1. Initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District’s K-12 math curriculum. The review and assessment shall be undertaken by a task force whose members are appointed by the Superintendent and approved by the BOE. Members of the task force shall have math and math education expertise and represent a variety of perspectives regarding math education.

Teacher Preparation and Licensure: “EDUCATOR QUALITY TAKES ANOTHER SLAM: ABYSMAL GRE SCORES ACROSS THE BOARD”

National Council on Teacher Quality:

A letter to the editor in today’s Wall Street Journal brings more attention to the low academic performance of the average teacher with more meaningful data than just how well (or poorly) aspiring teachers perform on the SAT. On the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) which many teachers take before entering a Master’s program, we find the best evidence to date of substandard performance for the nation’s educators.
While the letter cited older data, more recent data from the ETS site tells a sorrowful tale. With the notable exception of secondary school teachers, the large majority of teachers score at the bottom. Out of the 50 intended graduate majors ETS collected data on, seven of the lowest scoring 10 majors on the list are education fields. Only one field–social work–scored lower.
The most popular choice of graduate degrees for teachers with aspirations for school or district leadership is a degree in education administration. The average GRE score was 948, comparing poorly with the national average score of 1058 for all fields of study.

Tom Shuford:

“When public officials want to reduce crime,” says Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, “they listen to police officers. When they want to control flooding, they talk to engineers. . . .” (Letters, July 16). Implication: Want to improve education? Talk to the teachers union. A laughable proposition. Digest these data: Applicants for graduate study in education administration — tested between July 1, 2001, and June 30, 2004 — had a combined mean total GRE (Graduate Record Examination) score of 950 (Verbal, 427; Math, 523). That is sixth from the bottom of 51 fields of graduate study tabulated by the Educational Testing Service.
The mean total GRE score across all fields was 1066. Which applicants had still lower total GRE scores than applicants in education administration? Social work, 896; early childhood, 913; student counseling, 928; home economics, 933; special education, 934 —
education fields all. Other fields with mean GRE scores on the far left side of the GRE bell curve? Seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th from the left tip of the curve, respectively: public administration (“practices and roles of public bureaucracies”), 965; other education, 968; elementary education, 970; education evaluation and research, 985; other social science, 993. Note the pattern: Eighty-plus percent on the far-left-side-of-the-GRE-bell-curve are headed for — or, more likely, already employed by — public education systems. Ninety-plus percent are headed for some form of government employment. This GRE snapshot of the capabilities of the people who run government schooling monopolies is not unrelievedly bleak: There is one education “outlier,” secondary education, that has a mean score of 1063, in the middle of the bell curve distribution.
Tom Shuford
Lenoir, N.C.

English, Math Time Up in ‘No Child’ Era: 44% of Schools Polled Reduce Other Topics

Jay Matthews:

In the five years since a federal law mandated an expansion of reading and math tests, 44 percent of school districts nationwide have made deep cutbacks in social studies, science, art and music lessons in elementary grades and have even slashed lunchtime, a new survey has found.
The most detailed look at the rapidly changing American school day, in a report released today, found that most districts sharply increased time spent on reading and math.
The report by the District-based Center on Education Policy, which focuses on a representative sample of 349 school districts, found recess and physical education the only parts of the elementary school day holding relatively steady since enactment of the No Child Left Behind measure in 2002.
The survey provides grist for critics who say the federal testing mandate has led educators to a radical restructuring of the public school curriculum in a quest to teach to new state tests. But backers of the law, which is up for renewal this year, say that without mastery of reading and math, students will be hampered in other areas.

Full Report: 772K PDF

California’s students get into college, but not always out

Justin Pope:

For most of history, higher education has been reserved for a tiny elite.
For a glimpse of a future where college is open to all, visit California — the place that now comes closest to that ideal.
California’s community college system is the country’s largest, with 109 campuses, 4,600 buildings and a staggering 2.5 million students. It’s also cheap. While it’s no longer free, anyone can take a class, and at about $500 per term full-time, the price is a fraction of any other state’s.
There is no such thing as a typical student. There are high achievers and low ones, taking courses from accounting to welding. There are young and old, degree-seekers and hobbyists — all commingled on some of the most diverse campuses in the country, if not the world.
Many students, for one reason or another, simply missed the onramp to college the first time around — people like 31-year-old Bobbie Burns, juggling work and childcare and gradually collecting credits at San Diego City College in hopes of transferring to a media program at a nearby university.

Harvesting Kids

Andrew Gumbel:

When I told some actor friends about my experience, they immediately labeled it a scam. So did officials from the Association of Talent Agents, and from the Screen Actors Guild. What surprised me was how sophisticated the scam was – the company had my children (and, I would imagine, many parents) eating out of its hand before it asked for the money. What I didn’t yet realize, though, was how the scam worked – and how the entire industry essentially relies on shysters and con artists to provide a steady flow of child labor.
Here’s how the system operates. Aly Hartman referred a few times to Parent Guide’s “Burbank office,” but what she was really talking about was a child-actor management company called Kids! Background Talent, which is indeed in the business of finding children work on television and in the movies. Kids! Background Talent charges no upfront fees, other than a refundable $30 registration designed mainly to maintain a modicum of seriousness among its would-be clients.

“A primer on “Madison Math” – when is a ‘cut’ really a cut?”

Rep. Karl Van Roy:

Calling an increase in spending or funding a ‘cut,’ just because it isn’t as much as someone proposed, is a textbook example of “Madison Math.” In the coming weeks, you’ll be hearing a lot about the Assembly version of the budget and a good portion of the criticism will be false claims that our version cuts our most important programs. For example, you’ll hear that the Assembly budget cuts funding for the UW system and K-12 education. Both of these claims are patently false. In fact, the Assembly version of the budget increases spending on K-12 education by $464,404,400 ($16 million more than Governor Doyle proposed). And the UW system receives a $62.3 million increase above their funding level in the last budget, but yet you will hear cries of ‘cuts’ to the UW system simply because they were offered more in the Governor’s and Senate’s versions of the budget.

K-12 spending increases annually. The debate is always over the amount (and sometimes the source such as the redistribution of income, sales or property taxes) of the increase. The current state of Wisconsin Budget is $54,268,817,100. Senate Democrats proposed a new budget of $66,106,668,800 while Assembly Republicans proposed spending $56,336,765,800 in the next budget cycle. TJ Mertz has more on the proposed state budget here and here.

Learn to read Thai, get an education

Amy Kazmin:

In the dilapidated former canteen of Thailand’s Wat Si Sutharam School, about 20 Burmese children – aged five to 15 – sit on benches, carefully copying the first letter of the Thai alphabet in lined notebooks. Among them is 10-year-old Sai Htaw, a boy from Burma’s ethnic Mon minority, whose mother, San Aye, a worker in the coastal province of Samut Sakorn’s vast seafood-processing factory, hovers nearby.
Sai Htaw has a Thai name (Amporn) and speaks Thai with ease. But he neither reads nor writes it. During what should have been the early years of his education he was barred from Thai schools because he lacked a birth certificate, something issued only to Thai citizens.
Now, toiling in the spartan classroom, supervised by volunteer teachers from a labour rights group, Sai Htaw is on the front line of what is likely to be an arduous struggle: the push to secure formal education for the often Thai-born children of migrant workers from Burma.
With a recent decision by Bangkok to open schools to all, Sai Htaw and his classmates have been promised places in schools alongside Thai children – once they grasp the basics of reading and writing Thai. Ms San Aye is elated: “I want him to study as much as he can.”

Texas District Makes Gains With Special Education

Christina Samuels:

When leaders of the North East Independent district realized some students weren’t succeeding, they rolled up their sleeves and went to work. The results were dramatic.
The North East Independent School District, serving part of the city of San Antonio, cherishes its image as a diverse system of high-achieving students bound for college. But two years ago, the 61,000-student district received a jolt when 10 of its 61 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. At each, the performance of students with disabilities tipped the scale downward. Four were considered “academically unacceptable” under state standards, a rating that was successfully appealed but still a blow.
Superintendent Richard A. Middleton, who has led the district for 17 years, said the results were demoralizing: “When we have a school that for the large part is very successful, if a smaller cell of student scores creates a low ranking, there’s an air of disbelief and confusion.”
The plan required both a practical and a philosophical change for district professionals. Principals, in partnership with district-level data-coaching teams, dug deeper into student achievement data than they ever had before. All students, particularly those with disabilities, had to be taught the most rigorous classwork teachers believed they could master. Administrators were asked to internalize a belief that all students could learn—no excuses.
Not every school leader was immediately on board. Linda Skrla, an associate professor at Texas A&M University, in College Station, and a graduate school classmate of Ms. Thomas’, gave a presentation to district administrators the summer after the 2005-06 test administration. Along with James J. Scheurich, Ms. Skrla wrote a book called Leadership for Equity and Excellence, contending that unconscious biases can lead administrators to have low expectations for students. The authors urge administrators to confront those biases and institute reforms.

“A Loss of Innocence: Young brothers’ lives are example of the lure of gangs”

Donovan Slack:

Seven-year-old Brajon Brown is clearly a child. He hasn’t committed a crime, though he talks about it. His 12-year-old brother, Malcolm also is not in a gang – at least not one police recognize. He runs with a “crew” of friends formed when Malcolm was 9. Boston police call them “wannabes” and say they usually don’t show up on police radar until they are teenagers and committed to gangs known for more serious crimes. Some experts say Boston neglects such gangs, allowing momentum to build for a coming crime wave that would dwarf the record violence of the mid-1990s. Malcolm, who says the young males in the crew protect their territory by beating up challengers, faces charges in the beating and robbery of a boy earlier this year. “When you look into the eyes of a kid like that, in three or four years, you know he could take a life, no problem,” a former prosecutor and community activist says. He estimates that dozens of gangs like Malcolm’s – semi-organized groups of middle and elementary school-age youth who mimic the actions of older gangs – operate in Boston. Last year, 49 of 102 city-run youth programs allowed only participants 13 or older. And of 180 young people who received city counseling and intervention services, only 49 children were preteens. Stressing the diversion of preteens from lives of crime, Boston’s mayor launched an effort this year to enroll every child between 8 and 14 in a summer program. Teams of city workers knocked on more than 1,700 doors in attempts to reach families who need help. An official says 233 households signed up for services, but he doesn’t know how many were for preteens. Brajon, meanwhile, already walks the streets as if he owns them, slapping pay phones off the hook as he passes and knocking items from first-floor window ledges.

“New” words in Webster’s 2007 Edition

Merriam-Webster:

Just two years after a majority of visitors to Merriam-Webster OnLine declared it to be their “Favorite Word (Not in the Dictionary),” the adjective “ginormous” (now officially defined as “extremely large: humongous”), has won a legitimate place in the 2007 copyright update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.
Merriam-Webster updates its best-selling Collegiate® Dictionary every year with a number of new words, senses, and variants. This year, the word “ginormous” was one of approximately 100 neologisms to make the cut, while many others will stay “closely watched” by our editors for possible inclusion in future revisions. (This, of course, begs the question: so just exactly how does a word get into the Merriam-Webster dictionary?)

An “Honest Look at Charter Schools”

Jay Matthews:

Charter School City, otherwise known as Washington, D.C., has 25 percent of its public school students attending those independently run, taxpayer-supported schools. That is more than any other American city except New Orleans and Dayton, Ohio. Given their unique political location, the D.C. charters have gotten the most publicity, including surveys showing that the D.C. charter parents are very satisfied.
But exactly how satisfied are they? How does that satisfaction compare to parental feelings about the regular public schools? Do those good feelings about charter schools change over time? Those important questions are among the many charter school issues that are relentlessly examined in one of the deepest and most even-handed examinations of charter schools I have ever read–“Charter Schools: Hope or Hype?” by Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider. It is difficult to find a book or study of charter schools these days that does not take sides in the raging argument over whether charter schools are the salvation or the scourge of our nation’s schools. But Buckley and Schneider have pulled it off. Their book looks just at D.C. charters but is a useful indicator of what is going on with charters nationwide.

Madison Police Chief on Gangs in Schools

Madison Parent:

Madison Police Department Chief Noble Wray spoke on downtown safety at the monthly meeting of Downtown Madison, Inc. on June 28, 2007, and also briefly addressed the topic of gang activity in Madison schools during the program, as reported in The Capital Times (via the MadCrime101 blog, a welcome and valuable new resource focusing on concerns and issues relating to crime in Madison).
Chief Wray acknowledged the growing problem of gangs in Madison and their presence in Madison schools, and spoke of the need to quantify the extent of the problem and its trends, rather than reacting based on anecdotal “information”. I couldn’t agree more. The MPD can make much progress toward this goal by fuller and consistent disclosure to the public of incidents and statistics on gang activity (whether through its police district newsletters or its public information office news releases). But to quantify the gang problem in schools, the MPD will need to rely on data from the MMSD, since much can happen in a school which is relevant to quantifying the gang problem but isn’t brought to the attention of the MPD. Can the gang problem in Madison schools be accurately and reliably quantified and assessed for those schools that don’t have ERO’s (Education Resource Officers)? Of if the policies on when calls for service are to be made to MPD vary from school to school? Or when the MMSD relies on suspension and expulsion rates, instead of actual incidents of disruptive and violent behavior, to gauge school safety (all the while moving toward a policy of discouraging suspensions and expulsions)?

Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio / Video. More here [RSS].

Preparing STEM Teachers: The Key to Global Competitiveness

Sean Cavanaugh 884K PDF:

The document, produced by the Washington-based American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, provides descriptions of 50 teacher-education programs around the country. Although the report does not identify any single program or approach as most effective in swelling the ranks of math and science teachers, it says that more institutions are establishing stronger ties between colleges of education, which focus on teacher preparation, and academic programs, which are devoted to training undergraduates in specific academic subjects.
Barriers between those academic departments sometimes prevent talented math and science undergraduates from considering teaching careers, advocates for improved teaching have argued. Those intrauniversity divides also make it more difficult for aspiring teachers to obtain vital content knowl-edge in math and science before entering the classroom, some say.

Tutor Vista

www.tutorvista.com:

Our mission is to provide world-class tutoring and high-quality content to students around the world. TutorVista.com is the premier online destination for affordable education – anytime, anywhere and in any subject. Students can access our service from the convenience of their home or school. They use our comprehensive and thorough lessons and question bank to master any subject and have access to a live tutor around the clock. TutorVista helps students excel in school and in competitive examinations.

The Economist:

but TutorVista, an online tuition service, is aimed squarely at customers in the developed world. Mr Ganesh founded the company in late 2005 after spotting that personal tutoring for American schoolchildren was unaffordable for most parents. His solution is to use tutors in India to teach Western students over the internet. The teachers all work from home, which means that the company is better able to avoid India’s high-wage employment hotspots. TutorVista further hammers home its labour-cost advantage through its pricing model. It offers unlimited tuition in a range of subjects for a subscription fee of $100 per month in America (and £50 a month in Britain, where the service launched earlier this year) rather than charging by the hour. Tutors are available around the clock; appointments can be made with only 12 hours’ notice.
It is too early to gauge the impact of the service on educational outcomes, says Mr Ganesh, but take-up is brisk. TutorVista has 2,200 paying subscribers at the moment (most of them in America) and hopes to boost that figure to 10,000 by the end of the year. The company is expected to become profitable in 2008. Even cheaper pricing packages are on the way. Launches of the service are planned for Australia and Canada. Mr Ganesh is also investigating the potential of offering tuition in English as a second language to students in South Korea, where high rates of broadband penetration make the market attractive. Get that right, and China looms as an even bigger prize.

TutorVista, along with Rosetta Stone and other online tools offer practical options for families who seek new learning opportunities unavailable via traditional models. The nearby Oregon school district may add languages to their elementary programs. CyraKnow offers handy “phrase books” for the iPod.

Reshaping the Portland, Oregon Public Schools Summit

Portland Public Schools:

On May 16 and 17, Portland Public Schools, in partnership with the American Institute of Architects along with our sponsors, Innovation Partnership, Comcast, the City of Portland, the Portland Schools Foundation and PGE, held a community summit to identify ideas, explore possibilities and develop a set of guiding principles regarding the nature of Portland Schools Facilities.
Over 200 Portland citizens attended the two-day summit representing a cross section of the community including creatives, teachers, community activists, students, administrators, parents, business leaders, architects, contractors, developers and governmental leaders. They were engaged by speakers from the United Kingdom, New Orleans, Palo Alto, Cincinnati, and Washington D.C. with cutting edge thinking.

Christian has more:

In my opinion? Probably the most impressive effort of a city trying to re-imagine the entire concept of ‘school’ across its entire urban complex. And even more impressive that what started as a consideration of building a few new schools has become a re-imagination of ‘learning’ and communities on a much deeper level.

Key Special Education Legislation & School Climate

Click for a larger version

The recent Wall Street Journal article “Mainstreaming Trend Tests Classroom Goals” by John Hechinger included some useful charts along with a look at Key US Special Education Legislation:

1966—Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Amendments): Creates Bureau of Education of the Handicapped. Establishes federal grants to help educate special-needs students with disabilities in local schools rather than state institutions. At left, President Lyndon Johnson with the first lady at the signing.
1975—Education for All Handicapped Children Act: Requires school districts receiving federal funds to provide a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment to special-needs children.
Mandates creation of an individualized education program (IEP) for such students. Establishes procedures for parents to challenge related decisions about their children.
1990—Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: Revised and renamed version of 1975 law adds autism and traumatic brain injury to categories of special education. Calls for transition services to help older students prepare for post-secondary education, employment and independent living.
1997—IDEA reauthorization: Expands school administrators authority to discipline special education students in certain situations to include removal to alternative education settings for up to 45 days. Prohibits cutting off educational services to special-education students who are expelled.
2002—No Child Left Behind Act: Requires all students to take annual assessment tests although states can make reasonable accommodations for those with disabilities. Special-education teachers must be “highly qualified” in core subjects they teach. At left, President Bush talking up the law at an Arkansas school.
2002—No Child Left Behind Act: Requires all students to take annual assessment tests although states can make reasonable accommodations for those with disabilities. Special-education teachers must be “highly qualified” in core subjects they teach. At left, President Bush talking up the law at an Arkansas school.
2004—IDEA reauthorization: Requires all special education teachers to hold at least a bachelors degree and full state certification. Places a two-year statute of limitations on parents ability file a complaint or request a hearing regarding childs treatment.
Requires review of relevant records by parents and school officials within 10 days of a childs change of placement for disciplinary reasons.

Challenging the High School “Challenge Index”

Sara Mead and Andrew Rotherham:

Until a few years ago, America’s elementary and secondary schools generally escaped our national obsession with lists. Almost every week another ranking of best communities, most beautiful people or top hospitals is published.
But in 1998 Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post, began publishing a list of “The 100 Best High Schools in America.” The ranking is based on “The Challenge Index,” a measure developed by Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews. The list, published annually the past few years, has become increasingly influential. Other media outlets now cover it like a horserace, and high schools all over the country are reacting to the scrutiny.
Unfortunately, the Challenge Index is a flawed proxy for America’s “best” high schools. Using publicly available student performance data, we have found that many schools in Newsweek’s ranking have high dropout rates or glaring achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, many schools that fail to make the Newsweek list may be doing a better job educating all of their students.
The Challenge Index is a simple measure: It’s the number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Cambridge tests a high school’s students take, divided by its number of graduating seniors. This simplicity is both its primary virtue and fatal flaw.

More on WKCE scores – Missing Students

Chan Stroman posted a valuable and in-depth examination of the District’s WKCE scores, and is it in the spirit of that posting that I would like to share my own little examination of our most recent test results. Rather than focusing on the scores of our students, this is an investigation of the numbers of MMSD students who took the WKCE exams. My intention is to simply present the data and let the reader draw their own conclusions.
This journey began with a question: How did students at West High School do on the WKCE exams now that the school has completed their three year Small Learning Communities grant. A relatively straightforward question that can be addressed by a visit to the DPI web site. However, in the process of looking at West High School’s test data from the Fall of 2006, it was surprising to see that only 39 African American students had been tested. Certainly there had to be more than 39 African American 10th graders at West this year, and if we want WKCE scores to provide an accurate assessment of the
“success” of a school, it is important that there isn’t any bias in which groups of students provide the assessment data.
The District makes available a number of breakdowns of student enrollment data by grade, by school, by ethnicity, by income status, and combinations thereof. However, there is not a breakdown that provides enrollment numbers by school by grade by ethnicity. Thus, if we want to know the number of African American 10th graders at a particular school we have to make an educated guess. We can do that by taking the percentage of African American students enrolled in the school and multiplying that by the number of students in the 10th grade. This gives us a rough estimate of the number of students enrolled. We can then compare that to the number of students who took the WKCE test to estimate the percentage of missing students.
West High School had 517 10th graders enrolled this past year, and 14% of the student body was African American. This suggests that there should be approximately 73 African American 10th graders at West which means that 34 students or 46.6% were not tested. This is very different from the overall proportion of West 10th graders not tested: 14.5% (DPI data show that 442 of the 517 students in the 10th grade were tested this past year). However, this is only one year’s data at one of our high schools. We need to put this data in context if we are to draw any conclusions. So here is the data for the four high schools for the past five years.

High School	Year	MMSD Enrollment	Proportion African American Enrolled	Predicted AA 10th Graders	African American Tested	Total 10th Grade Tested	% AA Missing	% Total Missing	Discrepancy (AA% – Total %)
West	2002/03	624	14%	85.86	73	529	14.99%	15.22%	-0.24%
	2003/04	591	14%	79.45	54	484	32.04%	18.10%	13.93%
	2004/05	523	15%	77.09	68	457	11.78%	12.62%	-0.83%
	2005/06	563	14%	77.91	75	489	3.74%	13.14%	-9.41%
	2006/07	517	14%	72.98	39	442	46.56%	14.51%	32.05%
East	2002/03	598	21%	125.91	85	481	32.49%	19.57%	12.93%
	2003/04	538	22%	116.39	91	437	21.81%	18.77%	3.04%
	2004/05	538	21%	113.54	94	444	17.21%	17.47%	-0.26%
	2005/06	501	23%	114.15	93	443	18.53%	11.58%	6.95%
	2006/07	472	22%	105.64	81	385	23.32%	18.43%	4.90%
La Follette	2002/03	416	12%	50.23	42	373	16.38%	10.34%	6.05%
	2003/04	464	14%	63.72	41	385	35.66%	17.03%	18.63%
	2004/05	427	16%	67.40	50	355	25.81%	16.86%	8.95%
	2005/06	456	17%	79.57	53	389	33.39%	14.69%	18.69%
	2006/07	466	21%	96.88	76	413	21.55%	11.37%	10.18%
Memorial	2002/03	577	14%	80.75	74	502	8.36%	13.00%	-4.64%
	2003/04	612	13%	87.55	74	528	15.47%	13.73%	1.75%
	2004/05	592	15%	92.74	59	491	36.38%	17.06%	19.32%
	2005/06	552	14%	96.48	77	471	20.19%	14.67%	5.52%
	2006/07	542	14%	94.01	94	488	0.01%	9.96%	-9.95%

What about other ways to look at the number of high school students who took the WKCE’s?

(more…)

Statement on MMSD/MTI Tentative Collective Bargaining Agreement Vote

After much consideration, I have decided to vote against the tentative agreement negotiated by the District and the MTI teachers union. I will do so because the agreement fails to include significant health insurance changes, and as a result, unreasonably depresses the salary increases that can be provided to our teachers.
While the total salary and benefit increase to our teachers under the proposed agreement is 4.02%, our teachers will only receive a 1% increase in their salaries in each of the next two years. This is so even though we ask our teachers to do more and more each year given budget cuts and changes in our student demographics. The rest of the increase is eaten up by benefits, the vast majority of which is for health insurance.
I would like to see our teachers’ salaries increase by more than 1% per year. I believe a greater increase is well-deserved, and is needed to continue to keep and retain excellent teachers. I also believe a greater increase is needed so that the District’s starting salary for new teachers is competitive.
While money is obviously very tight, we could provide teachers with higher salaries if the District and the MTI teachers union – working together – would negotiate health insurance changes. The District’s initial proposal regarding health care insurance was to offer teachers the choice of three different HMO options or WPS. If a teacher chose one of the HMO options – Group Health Cooperative, Physicians Plus, or Dean Care– the District would pay the full cost of that HMO. If however a teacher chose coverage under WPS, which would still be available, the District would only pay the cost of the most expensive HMO, and the teacher would pay the rest of the cost of WPS. This proposal would have provided for a 2.81% salary increase for teachers for 2007-2008 – as opposed to a 1% increase.
The District and other employees groups have successfully worked together to revise health insurance coverages during this past year with the result that more money was available for employee wages to these groups. I was hopeful that similar results could be achieved for our teachers.
When I have raised this concern about how teacher salaries have been unreasonably depressed by the increasing cost of WPS, I have been told by some that it is none of the District’s business how MTI decides to split the negotiated salary and benefit package. I just cannot agree with this view.
While it is true that the total dollar impact to the District is the same regardless of how MTI splits the money between salary and benefits, I believe it is very important to the District how the money is spent. It is essential to the District that we have good, competitive teacher salaries and that our health insurance costs not drain money away from those salaries. It is essential that our teachers are paid fairly and equitably. It is not fair that a teacher who takes WPS insurance should receive $7,500 more in salary and benefits than a teacher who takes Group Health Cooperative. It is not fair that a majority of our teachers take Group Health Cooperative, yet they continue to have their compensation reduced to fund the benefits of others.
I am extremely disappointed that the District and MTI, working together, could not reach an agreement that puts more money into teachers salaries and less into health insurance costs. I truly believe that if the interests of the whole had been put first, this could have been done. Because we failed to take advantage of this opportunity, I feel I have no choice but to vote against the tentative agreement.

Higher starting salaries, more rigorous teacher training for Math & Science

Michael Alison Chandler:

Higher starting salaries, more rigorous teacher training programs and additional support for first year teachers are just a few of the incentives needed to deal with a projected shortfall of more than 280,000 math and science teachers across the country by 2015, according to a group of business, foundation and higher education leaders.
The recommendations were included in a report released yesterday by the Business-Higher Education Forum, a Washington-based group organized to increase U.S. competitiveness. Its release was timed to coincide with the national debate on teacher quality and pay as Congress prepares to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, the Higher Education Act and the budget for the National Science Foundation.

The complete report can be found here.

Madison’s Adoption of the Kronenberg “Positive Behavior Support” Principles

Doug Erickson:

A couple of years ago, the students likely would have been suspended. But under a new approach to discipline being tried in the district, the students instead were given the option of coming up with a fix-it plan — something more than just saying, “I’m sorry.”
The students chose to spend all of their recesses over the next two days playing catch with a football, just the two of them.
“They came back and reported that they did much better playing together, and that was the end of it,” said school social worker Mike Behlke.
District employees hope the approach will reduce out-of-school suspensions, which have been slowly rising at some schools and often have little effect other than causing the students to miss class.

Madison Parent has more:

The MMSD has high expectations for Kronenberg (”As a result of this training student behavior will improve leading to greater success in school. Both student behavioral referrals to staff and suspensions will decrease.” [from the 07-08 Aristos Grant description]). The WSJ piece does its part to create the impression that those expectations are well on the way to being achieved. But, as the scientific adage goes, anecdotes do not equal data. Since we’re in the final few days of a school year in which at least a dozen of the district’s elementary schools and at least two of the middle schools have had a year of working and living with this system, data should be available at this point on the actual incidence of classroom disruption, threats and violence as experienced by students and teachers in schools that have implemented Kronenberg, in those that have not, how they compare to each other, and how they compare over time; and that data ought to be made available to the public.

A Public-Private Effort to Fill Teacher Vacancies in Math and Science

Howard Blume:

Sherry Lansing retired as head of Paramount Pictures two years ago to head a foundation devoted to education and other causes. What if, she wondered recently, other retirees like her wanted to do the same.
Well, not exactly like her and not precisely the same way. She had in mind a lower-budget, in-the-trenches contribution: namely, becoming a teacher.
That plan blossomed into a media event led by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday heralding a public-private partnership to lure retirees into teaching math and science.
The effort was unveiled at Roosevelt High, where Lansing worked as a long-term substitute teacher in math shortly after graduating from college some 40 years ago.
Math, science and special education teachers are at a premium, and state officials estimate that 100,000 teachers will retire over the next decade, about one-third of the teacher workforce. Over that same period, California’s schools will need more than 33,000 new science and math instructors.

Accelerated Biology at West HS Stands Still

I have a friend who is fond of saying “never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence.” These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I interact with is a human being, with real feelings, probably very stressed out and over-worked. I also do my best to remember to express gratitude and give kudos where they are due and encourage my sons to do the same. But recent events regarding Accelerated Biology at West HS — and how that compares to things I have heard are happening at one of the other high schools in town — have stretched my patience and good will to the limit.

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Troops to Teachers

Jamaal Abdul-Alim:

The military features prominently in Room 412 of the Milwaukee Education Center – a special education classroom that contains some of the school’s most challenging students.
A U.S. Marine flag hangs just beneath the American flag. War books are propped up on a blackboard tray.
The teacher at the front of the class is Stan Loper, 44, a beefy, clean-shaven former U.S. Marine who is built like a tank. He begins the school day in a manner not much different from what you might expect from a drill sergeant, telling his students to use “nice and loud outside voices” as they recite their daily affirmation as members of “Club FAITH” – an acronym for Friendly, Able, Intelligent, Talented and Helpful.
“Who are we?” Loper yells.
“Club FAITH!” the students yell back.
Loper found his way into the classroom through Troops to Teachers, a U.S. Department of Defense-sponsored program that, among other things, offers up to $10,000 to get service members, both active and retired, to serve as teachers in the nation’s neediest schools. About 80 teachers around Wisconsin got their start in the program, which began in 1994.

Omaha-Area Districts to Share Revenue, Programs

Christina Samuels:

The new law retains the previous measure’s concept of creating a “learning community” of the 11 districts, located in Douglas and Salpy counties, which educate about 100,000 children.
The goal is for each school to have 35 percent students who are of low socioeconomic status. Students would be able to transfer freely between schools that have space for them, regardless of the district where they live. A paid, 18-member board will oversee specific issues that do not relate to the operations of the individual districts for the learning community.
The state will levy a common tax on the two counties that will be distributed to districts based on enrollment and other needs. Districts will be able to levy their own tax, and another, smaller tax levy will pay for an areawide school construction program.
The plan calls for the creation of “focus schools,” with programs intended to attract students from more than one district. The construction of those boundaryless schools will be part of the duties of the new learning-community board.

3 Simple Things: Conduct Board Business Differently

Good Health Care at an Affordable Price: Reduce Costs by $12 Million
Put a Lid on the Cookie Jar: Cut Taxes Over $9 Million
Eliminate Chaos: Board Decisions; Priceless: Improve Student Achievement.

MADISON MARKET COMPARITIVE HEALTH CARE COSTS

The bargained contract between the Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers, Inc. (representing teachers) stipulates health coverage from a ‘preferred provider’ (WPS) and a ‘health maintenance organization’ (GHC).

Bids have not been solicited from health care providers in many years. Comparative monthly premium costs for the employer and the employee in the Madison market:

Plan	Single Coverage		Family Coverage
	Employer	Employee	Employer	Employee
MMSD (WPS)	$673.00	$75.00	$1,765.00	$196.00
MMSD (GHC)	$365.00	$00.00	$974.00	$00.00
City (Dean)	$406.00	$13.09	$1,010.00	$33.00
County (Phys Plus)	$385.00	$00.00	$905.00	$33.00
State (Dean)	$438.00	$22.00	$1.091.00	$55.00

VIDEO: watch the press conference here. Download the 823K PDF presentation materials.

SCHOOL BOARD WATCHDOG GROUP TO HOLD NEWS CONFERENCE TUESDAY at 12:15 pm

In reference to current talk about a referenda proposal by the Madison Metropolitan School Board (MMSD), Active Citizens for Education (ACE) will hold a news conference this coming Tuesday, June 5th at 12:15 p.m. at The Coliseum Bar, 232 East Olin Ave, Madison [map].
The group will advance three proposals that the School Board should adopt and initiate in the process of deciding whether or not to place any additional requests before the voters for taxpayer funds or exemptions from the state-imposed revenue caps. The proposal topics are:

GOOD HEALTH CARE AT AN AFFORDABLE PRICE
PUT THE LID ON THE COOKIE JAR
ELIMINATE THE CHAOS OF BOARD DECISIONS

Speakers will include Don Severson, president of ACE, and former Madison Alder Dorothy Borchardt, an activist in school and community issues.
In addition to comments by Severson and Borchardt, there will be five display boards briefly outlining the proposals as well as duplicated handouts. The presentation part of the news conference will last 15 minutes, followed by questions.

Isabel Jacobson National Spelling Bee Roundup

Audrey Hoffer:

The silence crackled in a downtown hotel Thursday as Isabel A. Jacobson, an eighth-grader from Madison and the sole Wisconsin entrant to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, enunciated “c-y-a-n-o-p-h-y-t-i-o-n.”
Ping, the telltale final bell. Shoulders shrugging helplessly. Applause.
Misspelling the word cyanophycean, Isabel, the last girl in the group of five finalists, dropped out in Round 9, tying for third place. Cyanophycean is a blue-green alga.
“I feel great but kind of sad because it was my last spelling bee, and I’ll never be up on the stage again,” said Isabel, 14.
“I’m not shocked that she’s done this well,” said Jeff Kirsch, her tutor. “Luck is a factor, as is skill. But she studied and she’s smart – the last surviving girl.”
Gena Kittner:

he nation now knows what Madison has long understood — Isabel Jacobson can kick some spelling derri?re.
Isabel, 14, made her prime-time television spelling debut Thursday night at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, correctly spelling the French word epaulement, but later slipping up on cyanophycean and ultimately tying for third.
Isabel, an eighth-grader at O’Keeffe Middle School, was the only female speller by the end of Round 8 in a competition that went 13 rounds.
Elissa Silverman:

One was only 11 and the oldest topped out at 14, but many of these kids had been here before. They knew the white-hot intensity of the competition, the absurdity of some of the words they were being asked to spell on national television and the warm applause that inevitably burst from the crowd when they got them right.
Most of the 15 finalists in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee were a seasoned crew. And that, in the end, might have helped propel Evan M. O’Dorney, 13, who has taken to eating tuna sandwiches from Subway for good luck each of the three times he has been in the finals, to victory last night.
Evan, an eighth-grader from Walnut Creek, Calif., exuded confidence as he faced the only other contestant still standing, Nate Gartke, 13, of Edmonton, Alberta. First, Evan spelled “Zoilus.” Nate, a musician who is a member of a curling team, countered by correctly spelling “vituline.” The Canadian gave a thumbs-up as a half-dozen of his nation’s flags waved from the audien

Google News roundup.
Isabel’s words.

Detroit Mayor Advocates Charters

Kwame Kilpatrick:

Imagine what would happen if Detroit’s auto manufacturers decided to build and sell only mid-size sedans. Despite whatever media campaign they might mount to convince consumers a mid-size sedan was what they should buy, there would clearly still be buyers who would want to purchase SUVs or other types of vehicles. Worse, there would be lots of people whose needs would not be met by a mid-size sedan.
This scenario is no different from thinking that all parents will simply accept whatever school assignment Detroit Public Schools has to offer. Parents will choose what is best for their children.

Law lacks direction for gifted students

Amy Hetzner:

What the law doesn’t mandate is how students such as Adam will be educated – even though state legislators have identified programming for students with gifts and talents as one of 20 essential components of public education. The result? A mixed bag of approaches for how Wisconsin students identified as gifted are educated. Some are taught in regular classes with alternative activities to help speed them through lessons. Others are pulled out of class for about an hour a week of special instruction. Some may find a spot in a magnet program with other gifted students. And others get no special instruction at all.
These inconsistencies have led parents and others to sound alarms about the state of gifted education, invoking some of the same civil-rights arguments that spurred landmark legislation in the 1970s for students with disabilities.
They say gifted kids need special attention and programs, too.

Racine Jefferson Lighthouse School’s Gifted Programs:

Jefferson Lighthouse School has the largest pupil-teacher ratio of any public elementary school in Racine.
Parts of its building are more than 100 years old. Its technology is nearly non-existent. Its librarian works half time.
And every year, parents of about 10 times as many children as the school plans to admit in the fall line up in the hallway, hoping for a chance at enrollment.
“It’s like a lottery ticket to get in here,” said Principal Soren Gajewski.
What makes Jefferson Lighthouse desirable to so many parents living in Racine, those connected to it say, is its commitment to teaching students with intellectual gifts and the perception that it has few behavioral problems.
The school is able to meet the needs of many of the district’s gifted students, as well as siblings and others lucky enough to get in on the lottery, without added expense. In fact, given that the school has the second-lowest per-pupil costs of the Racine Unified School District, parents say such a program is a cost-effective way to ensure that gifted pupils get needed attention while the school remains open to educating non-gifted students as well.

Core Classes Not Enough, Report Warns

Jay Matthews:

It’s no secret to most high school students that taking the required courses, getting good grades and receiving a diploma don’t take much work. The average U.S. high school senior donning a cap and gown this spring will have spent an hour a day on homework and at least three hours a day watching TV, playing video games and pursuing other diversions.
This is sometimes a surprise to adults, particularly state legislators and school board members who thought that by requiring a number of courses in English, math, science and social studies they had ensured that students would dig in and learn what they need to succeed in college.
Guess again, says a new study, “Rigor at Risk: Reaffirming Quality in the High School Core Curriculum [350K PDF Report],” by the Iowa City-based testing company ACT Inc. “Students today do not have a reasonable chance of becoming ready for college unless they take a number of additional higher-level” courses beyond the minimum, the report said. Even those who do, it concluded, “are not always likely to be ready for college either.”

More here.

Where Education Is a Matter of Prestige

Abdul Kargbo:

In today’s debates about how best to improve student performance, little mention is made of how students’ personal views on learning may affect their academic achievement. Specifically, commentators seldom discuss students’ understanding of the utility of an education and the effects of this perception on how much they value education and how well they perform in school. Perhaps because doing so can be controversial.
Ask talk-show host and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, who faced criticism earlier this year when, in comparing students in South Africa to those in U.S. inner-city schools, she indicated that the American students valued education less. “I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there,” Winfrey told Newsweek. “If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.” Winfrey quickly drew the disapproval of a Washington Post columnist, who countered that in the inner-city schools he’s visited, most students “desperately want to learn.”
As someone who attended school in both Africa and the United States, I think both Winfrey and her detractors are somewhat off the mark. It’s not enough to argue about whether or not inner-city students want to learn. Rather, we should be asking why these students don’t value education enough to want to do well at it.

Update: A reader emailed this article. by Fred Reed, author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.

2006 MMSD WKCE Scores: A Closer Look

Test scores from the November 2006 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) and companion Wisconsin Alternate Assessment (WAA) were released by the state Department of Public Instruction this week. The MMSD press release on Madison students’ scores (“Despite changes and cuts, Madison students test well”) reports the following “notable achievements”:

that reading scores have remained steady and math scores have gone up;

that non-low income MMSD students score better than their non-low income peers statewide;

that a higher percentage of MMSD African-American students perform at the highest proficiency level than do other African-American students across the state as a whole; and

that a consistently higher percentage of MMSD students perform at the highest proficiency level than do students across the state as a whole.

Let’s take a closer look at the PR and the data:

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Local high school students graduate from Information Technology Academy

On Saturday, June 2, 14 area high school students will receive Certificates of Graduation for completing an intensive information technology training program through the University of Wisconsin-Madison called the Information Technology Academy (ITA).
ITA is a four-year precollege program that provides hands-on training and access to technology for talented students of color and economically disadvantaged students attending Madison public schools. During their four-year ITA experience, the students meet biweekly during the academic year to learn Web design, animation, graphic design and other technology skills. They also participate in two-week technology training camps in the summer, hone their technical skills in short-term internships and strengthen their leadership skills through community service projects. Their learning and development is further enhanced through matches with mentors, who help guide and support students during their involvement with the program.

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Hilary Clinton’s Universal Preschool Proposal

Sara:

Campaigning in Florida today, Senator/Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton put forward an ambitious policy proposal to move the U.S. towards universal preschool education. This is the first major education proposal rolled out by the Clinton campaign, and it’s a good one. The plan would provide states with matching grants (starting at $5 billion federal investment and scaling up to $10 billion) to expand publicly-funded preschool programs, with a priority on low-income and English language learners, and requires state preschool programs to meet high quality standards as a condition of funding.

Yin to that Yang: Congress passes a 10.5% increase in pentagon spending (Representative Tammy Baldwin’s votes can be found here). Alan Abelson takes a look at the dollar and what it portends for the next few years:

Whatever their provenance, they’ve crafted a quite interesting analysis of what ails the dollar and why what ails it isn’t anything trivial or transient. In fact, they see nothing but mournful things ahead for the buck, including, ultimately, its fall from grace as the world’s reserve currency.
Basically, they size up the dilemma confronting our “policymakers” as whether to tighten the monetary and credit screws to bolster the dollar or to open them up even further to support asset prices. They have no doubts as to the resolution: The folks in charge will continue to do what they’ve always done — “inflate the money supply and promote more credit, thereby sustaining asset prices at the expense of the purchasing power of the dollar.”
That may seem the downward path to financial and eventually economic rack and ruin. But such a trivial consideration has never deterred Washington. You don’t have to swallow whole QB Partners’ gloomy diagnosis and prognosis for the beleaguered buck to find it valuable as well as provocative. Even though we agree there’s plenty of sliding room left for the greenback, we’re not convinced the outlook is as apocalyptic as the duo contends.
The report itself is nicely, almost elegantly, crafted, although at times it lapses into a kind of faux erudition, a tendency compounded somewhat by windy footnotes. Nonetheless, unlike so much of the tomes turned out by Wall Street, it’s very much worth reading.

How to Become a Patient Parent

“Zen Habits“:

I don’t claim to be the world’s most patient parent — but it’s a goal of mine for this year, and it’s something I’m dedicated to becoming. Every parent loses his or her patience — it’s a fact of life. There are no perfect angels when it comes to moms and dads — we all get frustrated or angry and lose it from time to time.
But patience can be developed over time — it’s a habit, and like any other habit, it just takes some focus.
Here’s a list of 10 great tips and methods I’m trying out and experimenting with to help me become a more patient parent:

Law Enforcement and Crime Control in Madison — The Business Forum

Thursday, June 7, 2007
The Madison Club
11:30 a.m. – Networking
12:00 noon – Lunch & Program
Sponsor: Jennifer Krueger, Murphy Desmond, S.C.
The Madison area, we like to believe, offers many of the advantages of a larger city without the worst trials of big-city life – crime and violence among them. Recently, however, the Madison Police Department has dealt with a series of muggings downtown, melees outside local nightclubs, and increased gang activity. Is the crime rate in Madison keeping pace with the city’s development?
Noble Wray, Chief of the Madison Police Department, will join us in June to give us his assessment of the “climate of crime” in Madison.

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2007 Challenge Index: Ranking America’s High Schools

Memorial is the only Madison High School in the top 1200 (1084), while Verona ranked 738th.
Washington Post:

The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 27, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.

Milwaukee’s Rufus King is Ranked 259th. Marshfield High is ranked 348th. Whitefish Bay is ranked 514th, Shorewood 520th. New Berlin West 604th. Brookfield Central is 616th. Hartland Arrowhead is 706th. Nicolet is 723rd. Verona is 738th. Grafton 810th. Nathan Hale (West Allis) is 854th. Brookfield East is 865th. Greendale is 959th. Riverside University School (Milwaukee) is 959th. Madison Memorial is ranked 1084th. Salem’s Westosha Central is 1113rd. West Bend West is 1172nd while West Bend East is 1184th.
Jay Matthews:

The Challenge Index list of America’s best high schools, this year with a record 1,258 names, began as a tale of just two schools. They were Garfield High School, full of children of Hispanic immigrants in East Los Angeles, and Mamaroneck High School, a much smaller campus serving very affluent families in Westchester County, N.Y. I had written a book about Garfield, and the success of its teachers like Jaime Escalante in giving low-income students the encouragement and extra time they needed to master college-level Advanced Placement courses and tests.
I was finishing a book about Mamaroneck, and was stunned to find it was barring from AP many middle-class students who were much better prepared for those classes than the impoverished students who were welcomed into AP at Garfield. That turns out to be the rule in most U.S. schools — average students are considered not ready for, or not deserving of, AP, even though many studies show that they need the challenge and that success in AP can lead to success in college.
Nearly everyone I met in New York thought Mamaroneck was a terrific school because its parents were rich and its state scores high, even though its building was in bad shape and its policy of reserving AP only for students with top grades made no sense. Nearly everyone I met in Los Angeles thought Garfield was a terrible school because its parents were poor and its state scores low, even though it was doing much more to prepare average and below-average students for college than any other school I knew. It was like rating restaurants not by the quality of their food, but by the bank accounts of their customers.
I was covering Wall Street for The Washington Post at that time, and not liking the job much. My life was ruled by indexes¿the Dow Jones, the Standard & Poor’s. I decided to create my own index to measure something I thought was more important –which schools were giving their students the most value. This would help me show why Garfield, in a neighborhood full of auto-body shops and fast-food joints, was at least as good a school as Mamaroneck, in a town of mansions and country clubs.

Matthews participated in an online chat regarding the Challenge Index. A transcript is available here.
Related: MMSD High School Redesign Committee and West’s English 10 and Bruce King’s Report on West’s SLC (Small Learning Community) Project. Joanne Jacobs on Palo Alto High School’s non-participation.

Milwaukee Schools Add Assistant, Analyst to Board Staff

Alan Borsuk:

While the number of gym teachers and music teachers is set to drop 15% in Milwaukee Public Schools from this year to next, and the number of teachers, education assistants and secretaries is also going down, one group of MPS employees will grow 25%.
It’s the staff serving School Board members themselves.
In an action taken about 1:20 a.m. Friday, the board voted 7-2 to add a policy analyst to its staff at a cost of $101,745 for salary and fringe benefits, to be paid by a direct increase in property taxes exempt from the state-imposed lid on MPS spending next year.
Without discussion, it also approved filling a job of staff assistant serving board members that had been vacant for this entire school year. That job is budgeted for $83,000, which, with fringe benefits, will mean a cost of about $133,600. The same position was budgeted for a salary of $63,604 a year ago.
The $101,745 for a policy analyst would be equivalent to a $63,000 salary, plus fringe benefits. MPS generally spends 61.5 cents in fringe benefits for every dollar it spends in salary, an amount well above most other government bodies and far above private-sector employers generally.

Students’ rights versus limited means: Special Needs Children and School Budgets

Susan Brink:

The public school enrollment of autistic children, whether born into privileged or impoverished circumstances, has gone from a trickle to a flood. Their legal rights are crashing up against strapped school budgets.
Under two federal laws — the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act and the Rehabilitation Act, both passed in the 1970s and revised over the years — all special-needs children, including those with autism, are entitled to free and appropriate public school educations in the least restrictive environment. And, science shows, the sooner children with autism get treatment, the better their odds of speaking, reading, learning and eventually living independently.
A breakthrough discovery, released Feb. 18 in the online publication of the journal Nature Genetics, could mean that someday medical science might pinpoint the disorder in infancy, or even before birth. Researchers homed in on the genes behind autism, putting an early DNA test within reach.

Madison School Board “Kowtows to Complainers”

Susan Lampert Smith:

So kids, what did we learn from the Madison School Board’s decision Monday to reverse itself and not consolidate the half-empty Marquette and Lapham elementary schools?
We learned that no doesn’t really mean no.
We learned that, oops, maybe there is money after all.
And most importantly, we learned that whoever yells the loudest gets it.
The most telling moment at Monday’s board meeting was when the rowdy crowd of Marquette supporters was admonished to “respect the board” after hissing at Lawrie Kobza, who said she was “saddened” by arguments that the schools must stay open to appease residents with “political clout.”
“Respect us,” one man hollered back.
Respect you?
Honey, with the exception of Kobza and Arlene Silveira, who held their ground, the board rolled over for you like a puppy. Tony Soprano doesn’t get this kind of respect.

A Yin to that Yang – Capital Times:

Kindergartner Corey Jacob showed up at this week’s Madison School Board meeting with a homemade “Keep Schools Open” sign.
And he got a terrific lesson.
The board, which had voted to close Marquette Elementary School on the city’s near east side, reversed its wrongheaded decision in the face of overwhelming opposition from parents, teachers and kids like Corey.
The lesson Corey learned is perhaps the most important one that can be taught in public life: No decision is set in stone. When an official body makes the wrong decision, people can and should organize to oppose that decision. And when that happens, the members of the targeted body are duty-bound to reconsider their mistaken move.

More from Bessie Cherry:

er column was ludicrous. Comparing a school board who actually listened to its constituents’ warranted concerns to a parent who gives in to a whiny child?! Lapham Elementary, where my daughter attends kindergarten, is hardly “half empty.” In fact, the students there eat lunch in 18 minute shifts, and the school board’s own projections predict that it will become overcrowded within the next five years.
Smith failed to mention that the velocity behind the vocal backlash against the original decision to consolidate was fueled by the fact that two of the board members won their seats by proclaiming before their election that they would never vote in favor of consolidation. Instead of accusing the board of “rolling over like a puppy” and proving that “whoever yells the loudest gets it”, she should be applauding those parents for exemplifying democracy in action for their children. They organized, yes, the old-fashioned way (a way I much prefer to the prevailing point-and-click passivity of “activism” today), and involved their children by having them sign petitions, hand out flyers– they even staged an elementary school walkout.

Clearing Up Tax Rank Confusion

Todd Berry:

No question is asked more often of WISTAX researchers by the public and press than: How does Wisconsin’s tax burden compare with other states? And no issue is more debated by partisans and interest group advocates at the State Capitol.
Two reliable tax rankings
Based on the most recent national data available (fiscal year 2004) from the most commonly used source (U.S. Census Bureau), facts show that Wisconsin state and local taxes claimed 12.2% of personal income, the sixth-highest percentage in the nation. The U.S. average was 11.0%.
An equally useful ranking results if population, rather than income, is used. State-local taxes here totalled $3,714 per capita in 2004, or 12th highest. The U.S. average was $3,447. Because Wisconsin per capita income is below the national average, tax rankings based on population are generally lower than those based on income.

Milwaukee Schools’ New Strategic Plan

Alan Borsuk:

Two men, who often did not work together openly in the past, stood Monday in front of a crowd that, at many times, wouldn’t have been receptive to either of them.
“From our standpoint, this is a remarkable day,” said Sam Carmen, executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, as he and schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos made a presentation to a luncheon of about 100 members of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, a private group of civic leaders that has played a big role in charting Milwaukee’s course for decades.
“This is the real deal,” Carmen told the audience, describing the impact that a new strategic plan for Milwaukee Public Schools could have. The draft of the plan, created largely by the teachers union and MPS leaders, was released recently and is expected to be presented for action by the Milwaukee School Board in June. The Greater Milwaukee Committee funded the process of creating the plan.
Carmen said the plan presents “a real opportunity to change teaching and learning in Milwaukee Public Schools.”

Parents are failing the education test

Geoff Colvin:

In a world of rapidly rising standards and economic rewards for knowledge, are some American parents actually hostile to education? In my travels I’m seeing evidence that the answer is yes. It’s just bits and pieces so far but worth our attention, because in a globalizing economy, with the question of the U.S.’s competitiveness feeling more urgent all the time, such a shift would be puzzling – and very bad news.
I was talking some time ago with a group of school superintendents from Maryland. The dominant mood was frustration – a sense that they weren’t making the progress with our kids that they wanted to. A few of the superintendents surprised me by saying they had received complaints from parents who were angry because their kids were being made to learn algebra. Basic objection: “What do they need algebra for? It’s hard!” Just a few days ago I was talking to a middle-school vice principal, this time in Nebraska. She reported the same thing: parents angry over kids having to learn algebra.
Maybe that strikes you the way it did me – as simply unbelievable. Perhaps it’s the education industry trying to blame others for its own failures. But I don’t think so. These school administrators didn’t seem eager to report their experiences and didn’t do so until we’d been talking about U.S. education for some time. More important, their reports fit with other signs I’ve noticed suggesting that some folks really don’t like schools and education – and are surprisingly willing to let the world know how they feel.

Schools Reconsider Laptops as Educational Tools

Talk of the Nation:

Educators and politicians have pushed the goal of a laptop for every student. But a number of early adapting schools say the laptops aren’t helping, and critics argue that the computers are simply a distraction.

When is a school dangerous?

Under the No Child Left Behind law, the definition varies from state to state. In Wisconsin, that means some troubled schools escape the law’s scrutiny.
Sarah Carr:

At Todd County High School in South Dakota last school year, 16 calls to police helped earn the school an unsavory distinction in the eyes of the state and federal government: The rural school was slapped with the label “persistently dangerous.”
Under the 6-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, each state must define a “persistently dangerous” school and allow parents to transfer their children out of them.
But at Milwaukee’s Fritsche Middle School, 187 calls to police over a recent six-month period did not make the school persistently dangerous under Wisconsin’s definition.
Neither did 263 calls at Bay View High School, or 299 at Custer.

Madison Schools’ police call data for Fall, 2006.

Officials’ Silence Puts Parents ‘at Arm’s Length’

Jay Matthews:

Schools nationwide are calling on parents to get involved. The Maryland State Board of Education endorsed a broad range of family outreach initiatives in a 2005 report that called public education “a shared responsibility.”
Yet some parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere have discovered limits on the get-involved policy when they ask questions about individual teachers, whether those queries are about alleged abuse of students or a decision to fire a popular instructor.
Dawn Mosisa said she found an information void when she tried to follow up on her daughter’s story about a teacher who allegedly hit another second-grader at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville. Likewise, scores of parents at Lakewood Elementary School, also in Rockville, said they had a hard time finding out why a teacher they considered top-notch was recommended for dismissal. They also felt their input was ignored.
School officials said they are required to hold back information because of privacy laws, union contracts and potential lawsuits. Some acknowledged that a more open policy would help families handle the repercussions of incidents involving teachers. But the officials said there is little they can do.

Grade School Goes Corporate

Businesses want to build better employees, but will that really mean a better education for your child?
Elizabeth Weiss Green:

It took less than a year for Algene Patrick to learn all she needed to know about William H. Brazier Elementary School: rock-bottom test scores, spoiled milk in the cafeteria, and teachers who logged more absences than their students. These were the lessons her granddaughter, Lawrenesha Williams, brought home from kindergarten. When Patrick, who is Lawrenesha’s custodial guardian, asked the principal about the 50 absences Lawrenesha’s teacher had logged, he just cited the teacher’s personal problems. The grandmother decided enough was enough, and she put Lawrenesha in parochial school.
For Trinity Gardens, a poor neighborhood in Mobile County, Ala., that sends children to Brazier Elementary, the neglect wasn’t a huge surprise. In 1965, a nearby Air Force base closed-taking away 10,000 jobs-and a series of paper mills shut down in the 1990s, stealing at least 3,000 more. Most of the Gardens’ residents live below the poverty line, holding two jobs to get by. Who had time to care how many fifth graders passed a state writing test? (In 2003, only 7 percent.)
But in 2004, Brazier Elementary suddenly began to change. In just one year, workers cleaned up the halls, new teachers poured in, and test scores shot up. Noting the change, parents like Patrick sent their kids back to Brazier. Patrick thanks Brazier’s new principal, Merrier Jackson, for the turnaround, calling her “a godsend.” But it was actually a less heavenly group that sent Jackson to Trinity Gardens: CEOs.

Letter to School Board Members & a Meeting with Enis Ragland

Sue Arneson, Jason Delborne, Katie Griffiths, Anita Krasno, Dea Larsen Converse, Diane Milligan, Sich Slone, Grant Sovern, Lara Sutherlin:

Dear School Board Members:
A group of neighbors from the Marquette and Tenney-Lapham communities met this morning with Enis Ragland, Assistant to the Mayor. While we didn’t claim to represent any organizations, many of us have been tapped into various discussions and email threads over the last few days. We put forth the following points:

The city’s vision for downtown development is sorely compromised by the consolidation plan. It goes against all the investments in business development, affordable housing, central park, improved transportation, and the building of a strong community that spans the isthmus.

The school board’s own projections predict that Lapham (as the sole elementary campus) will become overcrowded in 5 years – perhaps sooner if we reinstate reduced class sizes. Where will the city find a ‘new’ school to open in the downtown area?

The Alternatives programs DO need a permanent home, but their own director stated last year that the worst possible site is next to a junior high. Other options are available, including the possibility of the Atwood Community Center once it is completed.

The Lapham/Marquette consolidation passed purely for financial reasons – there is no convincing or consensed-upon programmatic advantages.

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Some Schools Drop Laptop Programs

Winnie Hu:

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).
Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.
So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.
Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.
“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Waukesha Superintendent May Move to Appleton

Erin Richards:

Rick Carlson of SCF Educational Consultants, a company the district engaged at the end of March to help conduct the superintendent search, said seven people applied for the job, and that he had contacted Schmidt this spring to tell him about the opening.
Before becoming Waukesha’s superintendent in 1998, Schmidt worked for 23 years in the Appleton district.
“I spent 10 years there as a teacher, five years as a principal and eight years as a system superintendent,” Schmidt said, adding that his family in the Appleton area, including his wife, made the job attractive to him. “I live here and she lives there and we do weekends,” he said of his current family-work balance.

Why It Is NOT Harder to Get Into Top Colleges

Jay Matthews:

“From a student’s perspective, the odds of getting into college are a function of two things: the number of qualified students who apply, and the number of slots that colleges make available. It’s true that the number of prospective college students is growing, as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all noted in nearly identical articles published recently. Driven by the baby-boom echo, the number of high school graduates jumped from 2.9 million in 2002 to 3.1 million in 2006, an increase of 8.4 percent.
“But the number of spaces in elite colleges is increasing too, at a nearly identical rate. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the 60-odd colleges and universities rated ‘Most Competitive” by Barron’s Guide to Colleges sent out 199,821 acceptance letters in 2002. In 2006, the number of ‘fat envelopes’ had increased to 215,738, an 8.0 percent jump. As the nation has grown, its elite colleges have grown along with it.
“Why, then, the high anxiety? Because college admissions scare stories aren’t based on the overall ratio of admissions to applicants. They’re based on the ratio of admissions to applications, as reported by individual colleges. And the number of applications to elite schools is skyrocketing, increasing 18.9 percent from 2002 to 2006.”

Kevin Carey:

Every spring, the media send a bolt of fear into the heart of the upper middle class. The message is clear: “Your children are never getting into a good college.”
As Ivy League universities report — once again — that admissions rates have fallen to record lows, newspapers rush to publish stories documenting the increasingly “frenzied” (variants: “frantic,” “brutal”) competition among students vying for a coveted slot in an elite school. The stock characters include the tearful student — dreams crushed under an avalanche of rejection letters — the angry parent, the frenzied guidance counselor, and the college admissions official or other expert who notes with grateful wonder, “If I had to apply to my alma mater today, I couldn’t get in.”
There’s just one problem: it’s not true. The declining odds of getting into an elite college are mostly a statistical mirage, caused by confusion between college applicants and college applications.

Chicago Public School Leaders Seek Governance Changes

Tracy Dell’Angela:

For the second time in a decade, Chicago Public Schools leaders are making a push in Springfield to restrict the power of local school councils to hire and fire principals.
Board President Rufus Williams and other district leaders met with key legislators last week to discuss possible changes to the 1995 School Reform Act, which gave these elected councils of parents and community members broad authority to approve school budgets and select principals. The district wants councils to get approval from the central administration before firing a principal—a movecouncil advocates denounced as a power grab.
Valencia Rias, a director with the reform advocacy group Designs for Change, decried the legislative maneuver during the public comment segment of the Board of Education meeting Wednesday.
“You are trying to gut the power of 575 [local school councils] . . .because of what happened with one LSC,” said Rias, referring to the recent controversy over the council firing of the popular principal at Curie Metropolitan High School. “No one wants to have $110,000 contracts handed out by this board, by the mayor of this city.”

Michigan Reduces State Per Student Spending

Mark Hornbeck:

Gov. Jennifer Granholm announced this morning she will order a $125-per-pupil cut for public school students to deal with the state’s growing fiscal problem.
Letters to school superintendents informing them of the cuts will go out on Monday, the governor said.
The Legislature would then have 30 days to react. Lawmakers could accept or reject the cuts, or come up with the money to avoid the reductions.
“I’m angry at the Senate Republicans for having an extremist ideology. No matter what happens to Michigan, they won’t consider revenues,” Granholm told reporters this morning.

Michigan has lost many auto industry jobs over the past few years.

Cherokee principal to receive equal opportunity award

A press release from the Urban League:

Media Release
April 26, 2007
Contact: Scott Gray
(608) 251-8550
sgray@ulgm.org
Cherokee Middle School Principal to Receive the 2007 Whitney M. Young, Jr. Equal Opportunity Award
Madison, WI: The Urban League of Greater Madison recently announced that it will present Cherokee Heights Middle School Principal Karen Seno with the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Equal Opportunity Award.
The award is given annually by Boards of Directors of Urban League affiliates from across the country in memory of the great civil rights leader and former head of the National Urban League. Young was one of America’s most charismatic, courageous and influential civil rights pioneers. He worked tirelessly to gain access for blacks to good jobs, education, housing, health care and social services.

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Isthmus growth continues; closing plans shortsighted

Development on the isthmus continues, according to two two stories in the news today, making the prospect of closing central-city schools rather shortsighted.
From a longer story by Mike Ivey in The Capital Times:

E. Dayton Apartments: In other action Monday night, a plan from developer Scott Lewis and architect John Sutton for a five-story, 48-unit apartment building at 22 E. Dayton St. was referred to the May 7 meeting of the commission.
A plan for the site was approved in August 2006 that included razing a former church building wing for expansion of the First United Methodist Church on East Johnson Street. Those plans also called for moving a seven-unit apartment building from 18 E. Dayton to 208 N. Pinckney St. and demolishing a two-family home at 24 E. Dayton — all to allow construction of the 48-unit apartment building.
The new apartment building would feature 47 underground parking spaces and a mix of studio, one- and two-bedroom units.

From a story by Barry Adams in the Wisconsin State Journal:

Marling Lumber Co. will move from the 1800 block of East Washington Avenue near the Yahara River and has put the 3.8-acre property up for sale. Officials with the 103-year-old company, which has been at the location since 1920, say the move to T. Wall Properties’ The Center for Industry & Commerce along Highway 51 will provide room for growth.
The sale will also likely mean new life for the East Washington Avenue site and help create a gateway to the central city.
“That’s a very critical site especially when you factor in Fiore Plaza across the street,” said Steve Steinhoff, Dane County’s community development coordinator. “The two of those redevelopment projects together really have the potential to redefine that area.”

I previously wrote that growth on the city’s outskirts will likely slow as the world runs short of petroleum products and gasoline prices climb beyond where they’ve ever been before

NYC Schools New Deal with their Principals

David Herszenhorn:

The deal would increase base pay by 23 percent, compounded over nearly seven years, and add 15 minutes to principals’ and assistant principals’ workdays. The contract would also revamp how principals are rated on their performance each year, discarding the blunt thumbs-up or thumbs-down system under which they are labeled either satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
It would be replaced by a more nuanced review, aligned to the Education Department’s new accountability system, which grades schools from A to F based on students’ progress.
Starting salaries for assistant principals who work all year rather than just the 10 months that schools are in session would rise to $108,869 from $88,398, and their maximum salary would be $130,100, up from $108,869.
City officials expressed particular pleasure that the contract agreement included incentive provisions that are often opposed by unions. “In the private sector, financial incentives encourage actions that are good for the company,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “And there is no reason we shouldn’t also use financial incentives in the public sector to encourage actions that are good for our schools.”
As part of the deal to end the seniority rights of assistant principals, the city would help find a position for anyone who is left without an assignment. Should an assistant principal still not get an offer from any principal, the city, for the first time, would be able to extend a buyout of up to one year’s pay.
Assistant principals who declined a buyout would be placed in schools where they could be required to teach three periods a day and perform other duties.

Vang Pao Elementary School and The American Experience

Some years ago, while reading a book on Sherman’s March to the sea, a distant relative (who lives in the south) pointed out that the book was “one perspective”. Madison has a middle school named “Sherman“. Which sort of proves the point. A reader pointed out that Sherman middle school was named for “Roger Sherman”, signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Indeed, it was one perspective.
Vang Pao elementary school offers us an opportunity to discuss the American experience in Southeast Asia with our children:

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Audit of SAGE program defeated

Amy Hetzner:

A joint legislative committee deadlocked Wednesday on whether to study Wisconsin’s class-size reduction program, ultimately defeating the measure in what Republicans called a partisan maneuver and Democrats hailed as supporting a popular initiative.
In proposing an audit of the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program, or SAGE, Republican lawmakers characterized it as a routine request for a decade-old program that the governor has recommended spending $109 million on in the next school year.
State Rep. Kitty Rhoades (R-Hudson) also raised concerns about the state Department of Public Instruction’s practice of granting waivers that allow school districts to exceed the 15-student class limit called for in the law.
“The waiver process was not established by statute, nor was it established by the Legislature, nor do we even know what it is,” she said during a hearing Wednesday.

MMSD High School Redesign Committee Selected

According to a report from a recent East High United meeting, where MMSD Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash did a presentation on the District’s high school redesign plans, the following eleven people have been named to the redesign committee:
Pam Nash — Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools, former principal of Memorial HS. While at Memorial, Ms. Nash oversaw the development and implementation of the “neighborhoods” school restructuring and implementation of the 9th grade core curriculum.
Alan Harris — Principal of East HS, former principal at Black Hawk MS.

Loren Rathert — Interim principal at LaFollette HS, former interim principal at East HS, former MMSD Social Studies Coordinator, and former principal at West HS. While at West, Mr. Rathert oversaw the development and initial implementation of the SLC grant, including the initial implementation of the school restructuring and the 9th and 10th grade core curriculum.
Ed Holmes — Principal at West HS (since fall, 2004), former principal at Wright MS and former assistant principal at West HS. Mr. Holmes has been principal at West during the continued implementation of the SLC grant, school restructuring, and 9th and 10th grade core curriculum.

Bruce Dahmen — Principal at Memorial HS.
Sally Schultz — Principal at Shabazz HS.
Steve Hartley — MMSD Director of Alternative Programs. These include the Transitional Education Program (TEP), the School-Age Parent Program (SAPAR), Operation Fresh Start, the Omega program and many others. Mr. Hartley also oversees the District’s implementation of the state-mandated Youth Options Program (YOP), which requires the District to pay for appropriate educational opportunities for eligible high school juniors and seniors whose needs cannot be met at their own schools. A wide range of students may take advantage of YOP. The District’s YOP implementation and — importantly — policy regarding the giving of high school credit for non-MMSD courses is currently under review and has been discussed on this blog —
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/11/youth_options_p.php
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/09/madison_school_37.php
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/10/latest_madison.php

Lisa Wachtel — Director of MMSD Teaching and Learning Department, former MMSD Science Coordinator. Dr. Wachtel oversees a staff of 30-40 educational professionals across a variety of content areas. Possibly important, when asked by the Superintendent to cut two people from her staff for next year, she chose to eliminate two TAG staff (leaving a TAG staff of only five people for the entire district, if the BOE approves the cut).
L. Alan Phelps — Professor in the U.W. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (School of Education) and Director of the U.W. Center on Education and Work. He seems to have special interests in special education and intercultural learning. Here are links to two of his recent papers, one entitled “Using Post-School Outcomes Data to Improve Practices and Policies in Restructured Inclusive High Schools” and another entitled “High Schools with Authentic and Inclusive Learning Practices: Selected Features and Findings” —
http://www.ncset.org/publications/viewdesc.asp?id=1096
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2/content_storage_01/0000000b/80/28/02/91.pdf

M. Bruce King — Faculty Associate in the U.W. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (School of Education). Dr. King is a longtime West area parent and was hired by the District to serve as the West HS SLC Evaluator. He is the author of the November, 2005, report on West’s English 10 initiative that has been heavily discussed on this blog — https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2005/11/evaluation_of_t.php

Diana Hess — Associate Professor in the U.W. Department of Curriculum and Instruction (School of Education). Dr. Hess’s special area is social studies education, with a particular interest in training teachers to do discussion-based instruction, especially around controversial issues. Here is a link to an article by Dr. Hess entitled “Teaching Students to Discuss Controversial Public Issues” — http://www.indiana.edu/~ssdc/cpidig.htm

More deck-chair shuffling

From the MMSD:

For immediate release
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Six elementary schools to have different principals
Six elementary schools will have different principals next year in a series of transfers and changes within the Madison School District. The principals who are transferring have been at their current schools from four to ten years.
The list of new assignments, by principal, with current school and length of service:
Deborah Hoffman to Lincoln from Franklin (10 yrs.)
Beth Lehman to Hawthorne from Lincoln (6 yrs.)
Catherine McMillan to Franklin from Hawthorne (10 yrs.)
Michael Hertting to Lapham from a leave of absence
Kristi Kloos to Lake View from Lapham (4 yrs.)
Joy Larson to Allis from Marquette (4 yrs.)
Allis Principal Chris Hodge and Gompers Principal Sherrill Wagner will retire this summer, and Lake View Principal Linda Sweeney will take a leave of absence for career exploration. Hertting will come off a similar leave; previously he led Orchard Ridge for five years. Vacancies will be filled within the next few months.
“We believe these assignment changes are good for the students, the staff, the principals and the district,” said Superintendent Art Rainwater. “Last year, we shifted six other elementary principals after stays of similar length.”
Parents at each of the schools were notified yesterday. The changes will take place over the summer in time for the Tuesday, September 4 start of the new school year. Each of the principals will assist her successor in the transition to make it more effective and efficient.

Constant shuffling of principals damages the effectivenss of the MMSD. All the rhetoric about building relationships amounts to nothing but words, when these actions speak louder.
The superintendent named no principal at Marquette. Apparently, he plans to “consolidate” Lapham and Marquette regardless of whether the board votes for it or not.
With the uncertainty and stress about staff cuts and school closings, the changes could not come at a worse time.
Is the superintendent hell-bent on destroying the MMSD?

Report Cards: Waukesha group suggests changes in grading

Amy Hetzner:

After more than two years of study, a group of Waukesha educators has drafted a set of guidelines that challenge some traditional notions of grading.
Among the recommendations:

Removing evaluations of student participation, effort, attendance and behavior from academic results.
Ending the use of zeros for late or unfinished work, a “potentially damaging practice in a 100 point scale,” in favor of other methods that motivate students to complete their assignments.
Allowing homework used for practice or preparation to account for no more than 10% of a grade, with project work getting more weight.
Replacing averages, which allow single grades to skew final class assessments, with medians, which more accurately reflect a student’s overall class performance, in final grades.

School District officials stress that the guidelines, which are in the midst of being distributed to principals and teachers and go before a School Board committee today, are just that – guidelines. They insist the district is not interested in mandating universal changes to how teachers assign grades, often considered among a teacher’s most personal tasks.

I’ve heard from local parents again concerned about the lack of data in some Madison elementary school report cards. Several 2006 posts addressed this issue: Can We Talk 3: 3rd Quarter Report Cards; Mary Kay Battaglia, an Elvejhem Parent via Ruth Robarts and Thoreau parents.

MMSD Math Review Task Force Introduction and Discussion

The Madison School District’s Math Task Force was introduced to the School Board last night. Watch the video or listen to the mp3 audio.
Background Links:

Madison School Board Discusses Independent Math Review: Audio / Video.
Math Forum Audio / Video
UW Math Professor Dick Askey on the MMSD’s math scores; related: State test scores adjusted to match last year
Isthmus Take Home Test on Curriculum
Connected Math in Olympia, WA
Lee Sensenbrenner on Connected Math
The Politics of K-12 Math and Academic Rigor
New Math Curriculum Draws Complaints

6th Grade Textbooks: Connected (left) and Singapore Math.
UPDATE: A reader emailed this:

I noticed that there were 10 student books in the 6th grade pile for CMP. That was surprising since there are only 8 in publication. Then I looked at the teacher editions and noticed there were 10 as well. There are two copies of both How Likely is It? and Covering and Surrounding.
The statement, “A quick look at the size of the Connected Math textbooks compared to the equivalent Singapore Math course materials illustrates the publisher and author interests in selling these large volumes irrespective of curriculum quality and rigor (not to mention the much larger potential for errors or the lost trees….)” is following the picture in one of the discussions. Taking a look at the Singapore Math website It appears that in addition to the 2 textbooks pictured and student workbooks pictured, there are Intensive Practice books, Extra Practice Books, and Challenging Word Problems books, as well as other resources. Also, the white book on the bottom of the pile appears to be an answer key. There are also teacher guides for 6A and 6B that are not in the picture.
I’m not suggesting the statement above is false, I would just like to point out that the picture being used is not an accurate comparison. I hope you find this information valuable.

Bill Keys Bids Adieu to Ruth Robarts and Shwaw Vang

Long time teacher, former school board member/president and activist Bill Keys spoke last night during Ruth and Shwaw’s retirement discussions. Video | mp3 audio

Finding the Best High Schools

Jay Matthews:

Part Four: Rationing AP:

William Lichten, the distinguished Yale professor emeritus of physics, is at it again, trying to keep U.S. high schools from giving so many Advanced Placement courses and tests to racial minorities and low income students. Too many of those people fail the tests, he says. They should be given something easier to do.
Most of the AP teachers I know think Lichten is out of his depth on this issue. I agree with them. He is a brilliant man who knows the dynamics of the forces of nature, but he does not understand the dynamics of American public high schools. What he sees as harmful failure on AP college-level tests is actually beneficial exercise of flabby academic muscles. Interviews with many students, and some major studies, indicate that struggling with hard courses in high school helps prepare students for the academic demands they will face in college.

Part Five: Grade Grubbing in Scarsdale:

High school teachers often try not to think about the true sources of irritation in their lives. The perfidy of principals and the selfishness of parents can sometimes be too much to bear and are best ignored. Such denial has its virtues. But maybe the faculty of Scarsdale High School has taken it too far. They have decided that the best way to recover the love of learning at their famously competitive campus is to get rid of the Advanced Placement program.
The Scarsdale faculty make their case in their “Proposal for Advanced Topics Implementation,” a plan to create a set of courses deeper, more challenging and less prone to grade grubbing than AP. Their proposal is worth considering. It will appeal to teachers across the country. It also will help destroy the myth that Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses and tests are the major cause of student anxiety in our most affluent neighborhoods because anyone who knows Scarsdale can see that AP is not their biggest problem.

MMSD School Closing Discussion

Susan Troller:

At the heart of the issue is the fact that the East High School attendance area has more elementary schools and schools with smaller populations than the other attendance areas in the district. Of the 10 elementary schools in the East High attendance area, only Hawthorne has more than 300 students.
By contrast, La Follette and Memorial high schools’ attendance areas have seven elementary schools, and the West High School attendance area has eight elementary schools. The populations of these schools average over 400 students.
But hundreds of staunch fans of the East area elementary schools are rallying to the defense of their schools, saying that they are successful hubs of their communities, and that their small size and close-knit students and staff help engage families across all demographics while improving student achievement.
“People living on the east and northeast sides of the city shouldn’t be punished because the schools in this area were built to be small,” parent and longtime school volunteer Jill Jokela said at a gathering last week.

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